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Summer 2012
NASA Independent Verification and Validation Facility (IV&V)
As a college intern at NASA's IV&V Facility I worked with engineers and two high school interns to develop the RoverX testing platform. As the Facility's name implies, IV&V focuses primarily on verification and validation of flight software for NASA spacecraft. As NASA begins considering more robotic lander and rover-type missions it is critical to begin developing the V&V testing techniques that will be used on these missions. RoverX was designed to be a low-fidelity analogue that would allow IV&V engineers to being investing new testing procedures.
Project Details
My work on the project focused on creating the software architecture for the two on-board processors as well as the base station, developing the Ethernet communication protocols, creating an Inverse Kinematics (IK) algorithm for the robotic arm, and generating the low-level software for the speed controllers, servos, sensors, etc.
Technical Details
- Four, independently driven pneumatic tires on a COTS rocker-buggy-style suspension.
- A five Degree of Freedom (DoF) COTS robotic arm.
- A COTS stereo vision system.
- Eight Hi-Tec servos are used for the five DoFs, the end-effector "claw," and the pan/tilt functionality of the stereo vision system.
- A RoBoard is used as the low-level on-board processor, handling all of the motor/servo control and sensor data collection.
- An mwave ITX is used as the primary on-board processor, handling all of the executive functions and passing commands to the RoBoard.
- A base station (laptop) allows the operator to send commands wirelessly to RoverX.
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