Astrobee is a free-flying robot designed to operate as a payload inside the International Space Station. (Source code for Astrobee Flight software is available here)
The Astrobee Control Station is an Eclipse RCP application that can command and monitor up to three Astrobee robots or simulators. Astrobees are commanded via prewritten Plans, or manually via single commands in Teleoperate mode. Plans consist of locations called Stations, tasks done at each Station, and Segments that connect the Stations. The Control Station also commands the Astrobee Docking Station to wake up Astrobees that are hibernating.
The Astrobee Control Station is an extension of the Visual Environment for Remote Virtual Exploration (VERVE) that has been customized to operate the Astrobee robot on the International Space Station (ISS).
Astrobee Control Station Copyright © 2019, United States Government, as represented by the Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. All rights reserved.
Verve Copyright © 2011, United States Government, as represented by the Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. All rights reserved.
The Astrobee Control Station platform is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.
Astrobee Control Station includes a number of third party open source software listed below. Find the complete listing of third-party software notices and licenses, see the separate “Astrobee Control Station Listing of Notices/Licenses, Including Third Party Software” pdf document in the LICENSE folder.
- A) Eclipse Core Runtime, B) Eclipse Core Filesystem, C) Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) ECore, and D) Eclipse Modeling Framework XMI, http://www.eclipse.org
- Ardor3D , https://github.com/Renanse/Ardor3D
- JOGL (Java OpenGL), http://jogamp.org/
- Apache Log4j, http://logging.apache.org/log4j/
- Codehaus Jackson https://github.com/codehaus/jackson
The Overview tab summarizes the states of known Astrobees, and sends wake, grab control, and hibernate commands. The Guest Science tab sends Plans and some teleoperate commands to as many as three Astrobees simultaneously. The Run Plan and Teleoperate tabs allow detailed control and monitoring of a single Astrobee. These four tabs are also available to astronauts as the Crew Control Station.
The Engineering Control Station includes six additional tabs. The Plan Editor provides a graphical interface to create a Plan for one Astrobee. The Advanced Guest Science tab, like the simplified Guest Science tab available to crewmembers, commands and monitors three Astrobees simultaneously, but it also allows the user to customize commands and to see Guest Science telemetry in greater detail. The Advanced and Advanced 2 tabs display detailed engineering telemetry from one Astrobee, including faults, operating limits, power and disk usage, etc. The Modeling tab provides a graphical interface to edit keepout/keepin files, which are sent to the robot and displayed in the Control Station 3d view, and handrail files, which position handrail models within the Control Station 3d view. The Modeling tab also includes a CSV to Fplan Converter to facilitate the construction of repetitive plans with known coordinates. The Debugging tab displays engineering data helpful for debugging DDS communication with the robot.