Autonomous Vehicle Command Language (AVCL) References

Autonomous Vehicle Control Language (AVCL) is a command and control language for autonomous unmanned vehicles, enabling common XML-based representations for mission scripts, agenda plans and post-mission recorded telemetry. Operators can utilize a single archivable and validatable format for robot tasking and results that is directly convertible to and from a wide variety of different robot command languages.

It is best to think of an AVCL file as a readable set of commands, with three different subsets possible:

• Mission scripts of imperative step-by-step commands, either closed loop or open loop, with flexible timing
• Agenda missions of declarative goals and obstacles, which a planner can use to generate mission scripts
• Telemetry record of mission orders, timed sequence executed mission script commands, and state data

AVCL has been implemented in Java, C++, CLIPS and Prolog over the years. We think that it is a command language interpretable using any programming language or planning engine. Current research work includes mapping AVCL to a variety of track-related data models.

Dissertation

• Davis, Duane T., Design, Implementation and Testing of a Common Data Model Supporting Autonomous Vehicle Compatibility and Interoperability, Ph.D. Dissertation, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey California, September 2006.
• Also available: Dissertation abstract and Dissertation presentation.

Implementation

The Autonomous Unmanned Vehicle (AUV) Workbench provides an example implementation of AVCL.

• AUV Workbench: AVCL Help Page
• TODO: list additional theses and software implementations used during the development of AVCL.

AVCL to X3D and KML

• AvclToX3d.xslt stylesheet
• AvclToKML.xslt stylesheet

AVCL 2.x

• AVCL.2.1.xsd schema and schema documentation (under development)
• AVCL.2.0.xsd schema and schema documentation
• avcl and avcl.jaxb API documentation using Javadoc

AVCL 1.0 (now deprecated)

• AVCL.1.0To2.0.xslt conversion stylesheet to upgrade old mission definitions
• AVCL.1.0.xsd schema
• AVCL.1.0.xsd schema documentation

Uniform Resource Locator (URL) for this page is https://savage.nps.edu/Savage/AuvWorkbench/AVCL/AVCL.html
Revised 1 January 2013.

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