About motion control module sharing

A part of the vision of ROS is making integration of other peoples software easy. As a developer of maritime control systems, I’d love to use some well developed decision-making components.

Although I’m using plenty of generic ROS tools, I’m having a hard time utilizing the sharing benefits of ROS in the maritime motion control context.

Examples of things I run into:

  • There are some full vessel-control-stacks available, but not as individual modules.
  • There are no generic benchmark/simple stacks/modules available for new users to play with.
  • Control stacks have varying approaches. This makes integration challenging, as you first need to figure out what someone elses stack is actually doing before you can consider reusing some of their work.

(Note that this is a generalization of how I have observed open marine control software, and subjective.)

If you are a vessel-motion-control-system-developer or user, do you have similar or different thoughts on this topic?

I would be up to discuss experiences, tips and ideas.