UMAA Compliance with less effort and cost
(Introducing the WGT UMAA SDK)
The UMAA standard as defined by PEO USC PMS 406:
"The Unmanned Maritime Autonomy Architecture (UMAA - pronounced “you-muh”) is a PEO USC PMS 406 initiative to promote the development of common, modular, and scalable software for Unmanned Maritime Vehicles (UMVs) that is independent of a particular autonomy implementation through the use of standard interfaces. UMVs include both Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) and Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs). While targeting the maritime domain, many of the interfaces accommodate ground and air domains where applicable."
"While not specifying a single homogeneous software architecture for all vehicles, UMAA does require implementation of a service-oriented architecture. UMAA requires use of the Object Management Group (OMG) Data Distribution Service (DDS) as a core feature to enable this loosely coupled service architecture. UMAA can be thought of as akin to software library interface definitions or Application Programmer Interfaces (API’s) to "service libraries”. UMAA does not include development of the services, but simply defines the API and associated protocols that vendor autonomy solutions use as part of their mission autonomy solutions."
The UMAA standard will certainly benefit the US Navy and any organization that is involved in the development of unmanned technology for the US Navy. It allows these organizations to develop software that is guaranteed to communicate with other organizations hardware/software by providing software as a service functionality with common message structures. The common message structures are defined by "Interface Control Documents" (ICD) for seven standard service interfaces. (Shown in the image below). The message types within each of the service interfaces are defined by using "Interactive Data Language" (IDL). These "idl" files can then be easily converted to support the desired programming language chosen by the organization development teams.
As shown in the above image, the communications transport layer is the DDS Bus, which is defined by the Object Management Group (OMG) Data Distribution Service (DDS). Currently, the most widely used implementation of the OMG-DDS is the RTI Connext® software.
The current version of the UMAA specification (5.2.1) contains more than 580 messages. Of course, most organizations will not require the use of all of the messages, but implementing the DDS protocol for even a small number of messages requires many lines of code, and an understanding of the DDS implementation of subscribers and publishers.
What is the WGT UMAA SDK
Weather Gage Technologies (WGT), a company involved in the development of Intelligent Autonomous Systems for several Naval projects, has created the UMAA SDK. This software development kit will greatly reduce the time and cost associated with the development of UMAA compliant software, when using the RTI Connext software.
By providing "middle-layer" C++ libraries that provide all the code required to implement UMAA message DDS subscribers and publishers, developers can focus on their core control logic instead of spending time on writing and debugging DDS code.
The WGT UMAA SDK provides seven "DDS Managers", supporting all of the messages within the seven UMAA service interfaces. By instantiating a "DDS manager" for a specific service interface, the developer has access to DDS subscribers and publishers for all of the messages within that service interface.
SDK users can create a message subscriber with 4 lines of code. (Additional code is required to consume the message, which is application dependent) (See images 2 & image 3)
The WGT UMAA SDK also provides message "stimulators". These stimulators are GUI based programs that allow the user to publish single, or continuous messages for nearly all 580+ messages in the current UMAA specification. (See image 4)
Contacts:
Weather Gage Technologies (WGT) - weathergagetech.com
+1 (410) 216-3361
Real Time Innovations (RTI) - rti.com
+1 (408) 990-7400
** Create a subscriber **
Comments
Post a Comment