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.