An Overview of MOOS-IvP and a Users Guide to the IvP Helm Autonomy Software

Abstract

This document describes the IvP Helm -- an Open Source behavior-based autonomy application for unmanned vehicles. IvP is short for interval programming -- a technique for representing and solving multi-objective optimizations problems. Behaviors in the IvP Helm are reconciled using multi-objective optimization when in competition with each other for influence of the vehicle. The IvP Helm is written as a MOOS application where MOOS is a set of Open Source publish-subscribe autonomy middleware tools. This document describes the configuration and use of the IvP Helm, provides examples of simple missions and information on how to download and build the software from the MOOS-IvP server at www.moosivp.org.