SpaceROS Community Interest

1

Hello,

I am a member of the Intelligent Robotics Group (IRG) at NASA Ames Research Center and have been working to characterize SpaceROS’s performance in flight-like configurations so mission designers and system engineers can decide if SpaceROS fits their requirements and constraints.

The turnout for last week’s working group meeting was impressive; clearly, there is interest that I’d like to leverage into a discussion about community adoption.

What do you need to begin working with SpaceROS?
Either to gauge suitability for personal involvement or evidence needed by decision-makers in your organization to allow consideration/experimentation.

Some categories to help spur discussion:

  • Performance: What empirical metrics do you need when considering SpaceROS for a project? Are there specific types of benchmarks you’d like to see?
  • Compatibility: Is there hardware you need to see supported or other systems (e.g., cFS, COSMOS, etc.) you need to interface with to begin working with SpaceROS?
  • Capabilities: Are there key features that make SpaceROS more enticing or missing must-haves that block consideration?
  • Requirements: What validation and verification hurdles would prevent you from considering SpaceROS, and how do they fit in with the validation & verification efforts discussed at the meeting? (see @mmoll’s excellent meeting notes for a recap)

Disclaimer: This is not a formal request for information, and I am neither promising nor directing work based on the response. However, a robust community discussion about adoption provides valuable insight for bootstrapping the community.

11 Likes
2

Brian,

Thanks for this question.

I’ve talked to a few groups interested in a flight-qualified version of ROS, and they all had their applications with very specific requirements. I believe it would be useful to a) have a roadmap of where we believe space ROS can be most useful and b) create models and intersections of how all those applications communicate and work together. Much of the work done thus far has been on the foundational level for Space ROS to even be considered slight qualified software, and the next steps probably need to be in a more application-specific implementation. While both are necessary, I think the foundation building toward actual goals will help guide priorities.

I’ll think about this more this evening and provide more firm examples that might be first steps.