Working toward the development of a generic marine vehicle framework: ROS-MVP

Generic open-source software frameworks are significantly valuable for robotics research and development. With the intention of providing off the shelf AUV/ASV control, guidance, and operation solution, we developed a new open source framework called Robot Operating System Marine Vehicle Packages (ROS-MVP). The framework provides three sub-modules: a low-level controller, plugin-based behavior interface, and a mission planner. MVP mission planner comes with several common behaviors such as trajectory following and depth tracking. MVP is tightly integrated with ROS infrastructure and can be easily configured for different marine robots. In this paper, we present the details of ROS-MVP framework design and the field test results on an AUV in Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island.