As part of the “Marine Autonomy, Communication, and Sensing” course at MIT, I am building an applications codebase in C++ for use with payload autonomous marine vehicles. These applications are built upon the MOOS middleware and IvP modules maintained by Oxford and MIT, respectively.

One set of applications consist of a waypoint assignment app and fastest route generator, which work together to assign points to multiple vessels. Another application works with existing MOOS-IvP utilties to establish communication behavior directly between two vessels, who direct each other to changing loiter locations.

In the coming weeks these applications and vessel behaviors will be tested on the Charles river using multiple Clearpath Heron M300 vessels with RasberryPi payloads running the autonomous code.