LiveInventor: An Interactive Development Environment for Robot Autonomy

Reliable, robust autonomy is crucial for long distance and long duration unmanned exploration of the Martian surface, but autonomy is difficult to put on mission for a number of practical reasons. Like any engineers, autonomy developers require a platform on which to test and debug their product. For Mars missions this generally means one of two unique, identical rovers: one that flies and one that stays on the ground, shared by all hardware and software teams for test and simulation. Autonomy development and testing generally needs a complete, operational rover and must wait for all other teams to complete their work before really being able to begin theirs. Operating the rover in a sandbox for autonomy development and testing is an expensive, labor-intensive and time-consuming proposition. Even then, a duplicate rover in a sandbox is only an approximation of a rover in Martian gravity, atmosphere and soil. Compounding the problem is nature of the Mars launch window. The heavens impose the hardest of deadlines: a mission can only be launched during a short window every 26 months and projects must meet this schedule at all costs. If there are delays in the project's critical path the only alternative is to cut things at the end; fallback modes in which the rover can operate without autonomy are always provided for in case autonomy fails or the schedule slips; these become the mission baseline. One part of the solution to this problem is to enable autonomy development much earlier in the process, early enough to influence the final design. The purpose of LiveInventor is to provide a software environment in which rovers can be very quickly modeled, and their physical interaction with the world simulated and visualized, at a level of abstraction appropriate for autonomy developers, with accurate masses, joints, actuators, sensors, terrain, gravity and atmospheric conditions. Another part of the solution is to increase the number of autonomy developers available to work on the problem. LiveInventor has been assembled from open-source and COTS components so that it can be easily and cheaply distributed to academic institutions, enabling professors and students to easily develop software for NASA-relevant challenge problems.