Results Summary & Graphs

Survey Questions & Answers

Q: How does JAUS relate to the Robot Operating System offered by Willow Garage? Have you looked at a ROS shim?

A: ROS (Robot Operating System) is a quickly growing foundation for a number of robotics projects. How ROS interacts with JAUS is an interesting question. ROS defines it own messaging architecture and data model for that messaging. The OpenJAUS team intends to further investigate these common capabilities and build appropriate bridges between the ROS architecture and our SDK. We believe a ROS stack for JAUS communication would be beneficial to both the ROS community (in supporting possible JAUS requirements) and the JAUS community (in interfacing ROS capabilities to JAUS-compliant systems).

Q: Better documentation would be helpful. It isn't a very complicated system, but the lack of documentation makes the overhead more than it could be.

A: This question closely relates to the OpenJAUS v3.3 SDK. Unlike that code base, the new OpenJAUS v4.0 SDK has been designed from the ground up to support auto document generation comments and keys throughout the code base. This has allowed the development team to focus on documentation as the code was developed, therefore reducing the burden of adding documentation after-the-fact. As with the previous release, OpenJAUS v4.0 will include a number of code examples (primarily a Vehicle Simulator) as well as a suite of online tutorials. A goal of the project is to keep the learning curve for first-time users of OpenJAUS as succinct as possible. On top of this OpenJAUS 4.0 provides advanced settings and capabilities for users to learn when they are comfortable.

Q: Currently using MOOS.  Can you comment on how JAUS compares?

A: Unfortunately we are not very familiar with MOOS. However, we do know that a combination of MOOS and OpenJAUS are being used in a variety of projects. We have reached out to some contacts to see if they would like to answer this question.

Q: We currently develop on systems that do not have memory management or support dynamic memory. Is there any plans for supporting static memory environments?

A: The current OpenJAUS 4.0 SDK is designed to support the majority of potential users. To that extent it is being developed in C++ for Windows and Linux systems. However, support for other languages is on the horizon. At this point it is unlikely that support for static memory environments would be something the OpenJAUS team would tackle alone. However, it may be possible for the team to port OpenJAUS to a different environment if the work is paid for by a client. That work can be contributed to the larger community or kept as a proprietary branch of code, depending on the customer’s desires and budget. If anyone has specific needs which are unmet by the default OpenJAUS SDK, please contact the development team about supporting your customization requirements on demand.

Q: Why is OpenJAUS no longer free for commercial use?

A: The OpenJAUS development team is very small. The code for OpenJAUS v3.3 is largely based on the work done at The University of Florida for the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. Supporting the maturation and development of that code base has been a volunteer effort for a small group of UF students and alumni for several years now. Although the OpenJAUS development kit has been used by hundreds of robotics groups and companies for various projects, gaining additional volunteer support for the project has been difficult. Sponsors of the project have mainly supported it through employment of OpenJAUS developers and donating a very small portion of their time. Meanwhile, website development, bug fixes, user forum interaction and any other support requests have been done on the free time of the developers.

In early 2010, the OpenJAUS team spent a lot of time talking to the JAUS community about OpenJAUS 4.0 that is based on the SAE JAUS standards. Although many community members were interested in the work and the vision, no one was willing to contribute to its development. The development team pressed on in spite of this and set out to make the project self-sustaining by charging for licenses. In order to be fair to OpenJAUS users that cannot afford a professional license, the team decided to dual license the product and sell it to only those that are making money by selling JAUS-based products (commercial use) or those that are directly funding development of JAUS-based programs (government use). Therefore in the summer of 2010 OpenJAUS LLC was formed to implement this business model.

The goals of the project remains the same as ever: to build and distribute the best robotics SDK based on the JAUS standard, to lead the standard’s advancement and to provide an educational tool for people learning about JAUS. The fee for using OpenJAUS 4.0 on commercial or government projects will be negligible compared to the costs of developing a similar product in-house. OpenJAUS wants to work with the industry to inspire unmanned systems interoperability and empower engineers to solve the real challenging problems instead of reinventing middleware.

Q: What does the commercial license mean for my existing OpenJAUS project(s)?

A: The license for OpenJAUS v3.3 remains unchanged. Therefore existing projects based on that code base remain licensed under the existing BSD license. Going forward there will only be a fee for using the OpenJAUS 4.0 SDK for commercial purposes. A GPL-like license for Non-Commercial / Educational use of OpenJAUS 4.0 will still be available. There will likely be features of the commercial SDK that will not be available (or only available after some time delay) in the free license version.