This document defines a set of standard application layer interfaces called JAUS Environment Sensing Services. JAUS Services provide the means for software entities in an unmanned system or system of unmanned systems to communicate and coordinate their activities. The Environment Sensing Services represent typical environment sensing capabilities commonly found across all domains and types of unmanned systems in a platform-independent manner. At present, five services are defined in this document:

• Range Sensor: Determine the proximity of objects in the platform's environment

• Visual Sensor: Provides common configuration and setup for different types of imaging systems

• Digital Video: A type of Visual Sensor that manages digital video

• Analog Video: A type of Visual Sensor that manages analog video

• Still Image: A type of Visual Sensor that manages and encodes individual digital images

Each service is described by a JAUS Service Definition (JSD) which specifies the message set and protocol required for compliance. Each JSD is fully compliant with the JAUS Service Interface Definition Language [AS5684].

Purpose

The purpose of this document is to facilitate interoperation of unmanned vehicle systems, subsystems, and payloads by standardization of the message set and associated protocol.

Compliance

The JAUS Environment Sensing Service Set must support compliance assessment. To do so, this specification must be sufficiently precise to enable the "compliant" / "not compliant" distinction to be made independently of the underlying transport mechanism. It is important to note that implementations are considered compliant to individual Service Definitions within this Specification; it is not necessary that a single entity realize each Service to be considered compliant.

Document Organization

The layout of this document is as follows. Section 2 lists external references used throughout the specification. Section 3 specifies the JAUS Service Definition for each of the services, with particular emphasis on the description, assumptions, message set, and protocol behavior. Section 4 describes the message encoding for each message set. Finally, Appendix A and Appendix B contain the complete JSIDL representation for each service and their associated message set.