Ground Station

Real vehicles are servers that can move in space and carry sensors, as well as actuators. Real vehicles provide a runtime environment for virtual abstractions of networked autonomous vehicles, which execute the actual missions. Virtual autonomous vehicles, or virtual vehicles, for short, represent a virtual mobile sensor network, whose nodes may be dynamically created and deployed for efficient and fast information aquisition.

Ground stations are built like real vehicles, but do not move autonomously in space. With the exception of their GPS positions, ground stations have neither sensors, nor actuators. Real vehicles migrate terminated and defective virtual vehicles to the ground station for further use.

Configuration

The Configuration tab is where you can manage all the ground station settings like the ground station name, the ROS parameters, and the ground station own devices like the GPS receiver simulator.

ROS

The ROS tab lists the state of the configured ROS nodes and adapters.

Sensors

The Sensors tab allows you to manage the system wide sensor definitions. The description column displays the sensor names to be used in the virtual vehicles. The ground station automatically propagates changes in the sensor definitions to all real vehicles.

Real Vehicles

The Real Vehicles tab offers to administer your vehicle fleet. Each configured vehicle and ground station shows up here. Additionally to a real vehicle's name, type, and connection URL, it is this tab where you define its (convex) area of operation.

Virtual Vehicles

This tab permits the management of your Virtual Vehicles. Here, they may edited online, uploaded, replicated, terminated, deleted, downloaded, restarted, and viewed.

Tasks

This tab shows an overview of unfinished virtual vehicle tasks. On the ground station, new tasks only lead to virtual vehicle migration. Hence, this overview will be notoriously empty on ground stations.

Jobs

On both ground stations and real vehicles, Jobs take care of changes. Jobs are intended to be small, independent pieces of work that may run in parallel within a thread pool. There are jobs for synchronizing configuration data, for migrating virtual vehicles, for querying the state of real vehicles, as well as other ground stations, for handling stuck migrations, and for other purposes.

Map

The Map tab gives you a geographical overview of ongoing missions. You may choose between OpenStreetMap or an empty map. The provided map menu allows you to view or hide real vehicles, real vehicle regions, planned real vehicle paths, and sensors to read.