A new software architecture for developing and testing algorithms for space exploration missions

In recent years, planet exploration has received an increasing interest due to the possibility of exploiting planet resources and assuring a human–robotic colonized presence on suitable planetary surfaces. These goals can be reached through the development of smart robots, which are able to work on their own and without requiring a constant human supervision but, at the same time, assuring a great level of safety and reliability. To this aim, the development of effective architectures, concerning both software and hardware issues, could represent a great improvement toward this ambitious objective. This paper presents a novel modular architecture called Test Bench for Robotics and Autonomy (TBRA), the main objective of which is to create a test bench for rover autonomy missions where different implementations of a particular subsystem can be easily tested, while keeping the rest of the system unchanged. Thus, it allows the developers to be able to compare the results of tests and understand which version works better. Such architecture has been built on top of the Workframe, a generic middleware for real-time robotics. This two-layered approach allows the final user to deal only with the TBRA interface, which is designed to be extremely simple to use and takes care of most real-time programming problems, while allowing flexibility in the development, maintenance and future extension of the TBRA itself.

[1]  Herman Bruyninckx,et al.  Open robot control software: the OROCOS project , 2001, Proceedings 2001 ICRA. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.01CH37164).

[2]  Woo-Keun Yoon,et al.  Composite component framework for RT-middleware (robot technology middleware) , 2005, Proceedings, 2005 IEEE/ASME International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics..

[3]  Larry H. Matthies,et al.  Two years of Visual Odometry on the Mars Exploration Rovers , 2007, J. Field Robotics.

[4]  Larry Matthies,et al.  Two years of Visual Odometry on the Mars Exploration Rovers: Field Reports , 2007 .

[5]  Tara Estlin,et al.  The CLARAty architecture for robotic autonomy , 2001, 2001 IEEE Aerospace Conference Proceedings (Cat. No.01TH8542).

[6]  A. Jain,et al.  Recent developments in the ROAMS planetary rover simulation environment , 2004, 2004 IEEE Aerospace Conference Proceedings (IEEE Cat. No.04TH8720).

[7]  Chris Urmson,et al.  A generic framework for robotic navigation , 2003, 2003 IEEE Aerospace Conference Proceedings (Cat. No.03TH8652).

[8]  Michi Henning,et al.  The Rise and Fall of CORBA , 2006, ACM Queue.

[9]  Tara Estlin,et al.  CLARAty: an architecture for reusable robotic software , 2003, SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing.

[10]  Herman Bruyninckx,et al.  The real-time motion control core of the Orocos project , 2003, 2003 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.03CH37422).

[11]  Richard T. Vaughan,et al.  The Player/Stage Project: Tools for Multi-Robot and Distributed Sensor Systems , 2003 .

[12]  Stéphane Viollet,et al.  Toward Optic Flow Regulation for Wall-Following and Centring Behaviours , 2006 .

[13]  Tara Estlin,et al.  CLARAty: Challenges and Steps toward Reusable Robotic Software , 2006 .

[14]  Morgan Quigley,et al.  ROS: an open-source Robot Operating System , 2009, ICRA 2009.

[15]  Larry H. Matthies,et al.  Robust and Efficient Stereo Feature Tracking for Visual Odometry , 2008, 2008 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.