EDORAS: Easing the Development of Robot Applications for Space Missions

In order to address NASA's goals to establish a sustained presence in the Moon and beyond, there is the need for closer integration between robot and flight software, in order to take advantage of the state-of-the-art robot application tools, usually available as ROS 2-based libraries, and allow them to operate on space missions. During the last few years in particular, bridges between ROS 2 and cFS have been created such that they enable both frameworks to operate together. In this project, TRACLabs proposes to implement a set of software tools that eases the adaptation modifications that are often needed to efficiently integrate ROS 2 applications with flight software. Our main goal is to reduce development time by providing reusable, configurable libraries that make it easy for a robotics developer to adapt their existing (terrestrial) robot applications to be suitable for integration with flight software with its accompanying constraints. We call these tools EDORAS (Easing the Development of Robot Applications for Space Missions). To clarify, EDORAS is not a bridge; rather, it is a set of tools that can be used at a high-level (on top of an existing bridge) to reduce the overhead of adapting existing robot applications by providing tools to automate the conversion from ROS 2 to cFS message types, and providing tools to address the particular needs of the transmission of large message types, if they need to be transferred, considering the bandwidth limitations of the flight system.

EDORAS has the potential to have large impact across a broad collection of various NASA efforts involving robot and autonomous operations technologies including ISAM, lunar surface operations, and Artemis by providing the ability to integrate state-of-the-art robotics software tools for perception, planning, navigation, user-interfaces and machine learning developed in ROS 2 with the mission-specific safety-critical software subsystems. The capabilities enabled by EDORAS are of direct interest to a variety of commercial space efforts led by companies such as Astrobotic, Blue Origin and Intuitive Machines, which aim to deploy robotic systems to operate, maintain and support orbital and surface spacecraft.

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