The Joint Architecture for Unmanned Systems (JAUS) is an emerging SAE standard for messaging between and within unmanned systems, enhancing interoperability, code reusability, and modularity. To date, most JAUS implementations have been produced by developers in the JAUS Working Group, who have an intimate understanding of the intent of the specification. As a result, the standards documents produced by the Working Group sometimes omit key implementation assumptions the developers had in mind.

The work described in this thesis is intended to provide objective feedback from the viewpoint of a developer who began implementing JAUS independent of the standards committee and is now embedded in the Experimentation Task Group.

This paper presents the lessons learned through this journey, from development of the first-ever JAUS software development toolkit for the LabVIEW programming language, through participation in Experimentation Task Group interoperability exercises 2.75 and 3.0, and to the establishment of the first internet-based testing environment for JAUS.

The results of this experience are presented as a collection of recommendations to the standards committee, organized in a series of diverse implementation case studies.