Design of a Software Structure and a Mission Handler for Cooperative Marine Robots

This paper provides an overview on the software architecture used for the realization of cooperative behavior of heterogeneous marine robots. The work was performed within the European Research Project MORPH (FP7-ICT-288704) which strived for the solution to ocean mapping missions over harsh environments like vertical and overhanging cliff walls by employing a team of different unmanned marine crafts. The paper describes the software structure on the vehicles and all necessary links between the so called 'Mission Handler', that is responsible for the coordinated execution of the different algorithms, and the other software components of the vehicle. This strict separation was enabled by the use of the middleware Robot Operating System (ROS), which is widely spread within the international robotic community.