Mission Planning for Deep Sea Robots

Abstract

Our challenge was to define a format for a mission plan, and develop an application which allows the users of the robot to create a mission plan effectively. This application should assist the user in the process of creating a mission plan as much as possible. Our client was Allseas who was already the sponsor of the LOBSTER project. During the research phase we learned that our application would be best suited for an offline environment, as the user would not necessarily have an internet connection due to being at sea. Furthermore, we learned that the application had to be easy to use and not too complex. Throughout the course of this project we worked with Scrum, our repository was hosted on GitHub, with Travis CI integrated to test our code. Using this we could see our coverage and errors could not enter our final product. In our team we cooperated with an open culture to prevent frustrations. We made agreements on work hours and software methodologies. Still, we faced challenges which ranged from underestimating time needed for certain features to an increasing complexity of code and data gathering. The final product is a web application which can be accessed offline. This application can be successfully used to create missions for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles, which we showed in our final usability evaluation. The LOBSTER team will be using our product to plan their missions in the future. However, before it can be fully used, the low-level control software of the LOBSTER robots needs to be finished by the LOBSTER team.