Nested autonomy for unmanned marine vehicles with MOOS‐IvP

Abstract This document describes the MOOS‐IvP autonomy software for unmanned marine vehicles and its use in large‐scale ocean sensing systems. MOOS‐IvP is composed of two open‐source software projects funded by the Office of Naval Research. MOOS provides a core autonomy middleware capability, and the MOOS project additionally provides a set of ubiquitous infrastructure utilities. The IvP Helm is the primary component of an additional set of capabilities implemented to form a full marine autonomy suite known as MOOS‐IvP. This software and architecture are platform and mission agnostic and allow for a scalable nesting of unmanned vehicle nodes to form large‐scale, long‐endurance ocean sensing systems composed of heterogeneous platform types with varying degrees of communications connectivity, bandwidth, and latency. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.