ROS…in…space!
If you joined us for ROS World 2021 back in October, then you saw the excellent keynote presentation from Kim Hambuchen at NASA Johnson Space Center, in which she talked about many of the ways that NASA has benefitted from ROS. Inspired by Dr. Hambuchen's presentation, let's take a quick tour of ROS-based space applications.
When we announced the first ROSCon in 2012, we didn't know what to expect; it was a gamble to organize a conference around open source robot software. We certainly didn't expect NASA to present their use of ROS in the Robonaut 2 (R2) humanoid robot! We learned that NASA was switching the R2 software over to ROS and that they had built a full Gazebo model of the robot and the International Space Station (ISS) which it would eventually inhabit. The NASA team was back at ROSCon 2014 to present an update on the project, which happened to be just two weeks after we got word that their ROS-based R2 was up and running on ISS, our first confirmed use of ROS in space.
Robonaut 2 (R2) on the ISS.
At the same time that R2 was heading to ISS, another NASA team was hard at work on their next generation humanoid, Robonaut 5 (R5), also known as Valkyrie. R5's software was ROS-based from the beginning, and the team used Gazebo heavily in development and testing. NASA and R5 went on to compete in the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC).
Robonaut 2 simulation in Gazebo
Coincidentally, we at Open Robotics were teamed up with DARPA to build and run the simulation track of the DRC, the Virtual Robotics Challenge. In 2015, quick on the heels of the DRC, we started work with NASA to prepare for the inaugural Space Robotics Challenge (SRC). For the SRC, we simulated R5 performing habitat preparation tasks in a cloud-hosted competition that asked people around the world to develop new approaches to supervised autonomy to control this complex humanoid robot. Demonstrating the potential of such open competitions, the winner of the SRC was an unexpected newcomer. To our delight, that winner successfully transferred his code from simulation to the real robot hardware in a single day, an early example of what is now called "sim-to-real".
Robonaut 5 preparing habitation for the Space Robotics Challenge
In parallel with all this work on humanoids, another NASA team was pursuing a complementary approach to building robots to help people in space: free-flyers that jet around inside ISS. Building on their earlier success with SPHERES, NASA developed the successor Astrobee. As we learned from their ROSCon presentation in 2018, Astrobee's software is built on ROS, and the Astrobee team uses Gazebo heavily for development and testing, and they've made much of their software available on GitHub. Today there are multiple Astrobees running on ISS, and one of them even featured in a video call between orbiting astronauts and US Vice President Kamala Harris.
Astrobee aboard the International Space Station
Looking beyond ISS, we at Open Robotics are currently working with NASA on their VIPER program, which will send a mobile robot to the South Pole of the Moon in 2023 to "get a close-up view of the location and concentration of water ice that could eventually be harvested to sustain human exploration on the Moon, Mars — and beyond." As our colleague Ian Chen presented at ROSCon in 2018, the mission relies heavily on Gazebo simulations for development, testing, and operator training. At ROS World 2021, our own Jacob Perron presented an update on VIPER, including details of how ROS 2 will be in the control loop for the rover, as part of the ground-based flight software.
We believe that VIPER is just the latest in what will be a long line of space robotics missions that rely on ROS to build their autonomy software. To that end, we're now working with Blue Origin and NASA to develop Space ROS, which is a variant of ROS 2 specifically designed to satisfy the strict verification and validation requirements that aerospace software must undergo before use in mission-critical applications. In this work, we take inspiration from the successful result that Apex.AI achieved in creating their ROS 2-based safety-certified autonomous vehicle platform. We envision a near future in which rich, capable, and space-qualified ROS 2 autonomy stacks are helping NASA and other agencies around the world to accomplish their science and exploration goals.
We were honored by the way that Dr. Hambuchen closed her ROS World presentation:
““Thank you Open Robotics; you’ve changed the development pathway for us at NASA.””
We look forward to many more years of collaborating with NASA and everyone else in the space robotics community!
If you know of other space applications using ROS or related software, please let us know. Like any open source project, we usually learn about how people are using our tools when they tell us about it.