In order to achieve a comprehensive situational awareness suite, there is a need to standardize how we access and manipulate information streams. These information streams are often singular, reducing information to what is relevant for a targeted sensor context, which limits their ability to allow multiple autonomous platforms to perceive based on the total available information. To enable distributed situational awareness, here we present an approach that standardizes the management of information streams across contexts of varying sensor domains. These information streams enable individual platforms to dynamically query any relevant information where it will co-register the sensor streams and be ready for perception systems to rationalize the information. This system is enabled through the Robot Operating System 2 (ROS 2), which provides a distributed publisher-subscriber model for communication in addition to standardization for autonomous systems, such as positional referencing, sensor processing, and dynamic mapping. Based on ROS 2’s system components, we show a system that enables sensor information to retain its generalized form, which other platforms can manipulate for their targeted need without the unnecessary destruction of data to perceive within its system. The development of this cross-platform approach to sensor co-registration is a major step toward our goal of distributed situational awareness and will enable significant research efforts in the future.
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