We propose to research and develop simulation and control software for use with rovers that are operated remotely. While we expect our work to be broadly applicable to remotely operated vehicles in…

This is a $266,687 cooperative agreement awarded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Shared Services Center to the Open Source Robotics Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization that builds open source robot software. The agreement supports the development of simulation and control software for use with remotely operated rovers, specifically for the NASA Resource Prospector (RP) mission. The work leverages the Gazebo high-fidelity robotics simulation environment and Robot Operating System (ROS), both of which are open source platforms that the Foundation helps develop and maintain. The goal is to provide NASA with a prototype robotic system architecture and simulation capabilities to support the testing and development of the RP mission software. This contract does not have a set-aside designation.

We propose to research and develop simulation and control software for use with rovers that are operated remotely. While we expect our work to be broadly applicable to remotely operated vehicles in general, we take as our motivating use case the resource prospector (RP) mission, which is currently under development at NASA. We will base our work on gazebo, an open source high-fidelity robotics simulation environment that our team has developed for over 15 years, and ROS (robot operating system), an open source collection of robot software, which we distribute, maintain, and develop in collaboration with a wide network of contributors from academia, government, and industry. We will make open source improvements to these existing systems that can be used by any future rover mission. We propose to help meet the software development and testing needs of planetary rover missions, such as RP, by developing ROS and gazebo systems and configuration. Our near-term goal is to support the use of gazebo-based software simulation in building, evaluating, and practicing with remote operation interfaces by implementing a prototype robotic system architecture using existing ROS components. As mission software components are developed, they can replace the prototype components in the architecture while maintaining a cohesive system for end-to-end testing and development.