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ESROCOS

Brief Description

The ESROCOS project is an EU funded H2020 project (grant agreement No 730080), conducted within the PERASPERA program. It aims to develop a system software stack and development environment for future robotic space missions. It is an open source project, targeting current issues in this domain, like vendor lock-ins or insufficient coverage of RAMS (Reliability, Availability, Maintainability, and Safety) properties.

Official project homepage: http://www.h2020-esrocos.eu/

Project Objectives

The PERASPERA OG1 activity is devoted to the design of a Robot Control Operating Software (RCOS) that can provide adequate features and performance with space-grade Reliability, Availability, Maintainability and Safety (RAMS) properties. The goal of the ESROCOS project is to provide an open source framework, which can assist in the development of flight software for space robots. By providing an open standard, which can be used by research labs and in the industry, it is expected that the Technology Readiness Level (TRL) can be raised more efficiently, and vendor lock-in through proprietary environments can be reduced. Current state-of-the-art robotic frameworks are already addressing some of these key aspects, but mostly fail to deliver the degree of quality expected in the space environment. In the industrial robotics world, manufacturers of robots construct their RCOS by augmenting commercial real-time operating systems with proprietary libraries, implementing the extra functionality. While this serves the aim of selling robotic systems and applications, it does not support the standardization of systems and algorithms across multiple vendors. Other open source frameworks do not have sufficient RAMS properties to be viable for space missions.

• Obj 1. Develop a Space-oriented RCOS: ESROCOS shall target space development needs by including space-grade RAMS attributes (refer to ESA ECSS standards) and off-line/on-line formal verification, Telemetry and Telecommand (TM/TC) messages and qualification of industrial drivers, such as the Controller Area Network (CAN) bus or EtherCAT protocols. Two reference implementations shall be carried out on space representative avionics.
• Obj 2. Integrate advanced modelling technologies: ESROCOS shall include complete model-based methodology, supporting the design of the individual components as well as the interfaces for their interaction and integration. It shall enable verification of structural and behavioural properties at the system level, and provide a feature to generate glue code. This approach allows the separation of the model from the target platform, which is a requirement for the reuse of the software in future developments
• Obj 3. Focus on the space robotics community: ESROCOS requirements will be consolidated by actors leading state-of-the art robotics space missions.
• Obj 4. Allow integration of complex robotics applications: ESROCOS shall provide a flexible architecture, following the time and space partitioning and mixed-criticality approach, which also allows hosting different levels of space quality applications on the same on-board computer.
• Obj 5. Avoid vendor-lock in situations: The outcome of the proposal is to be delivered as open source code (Mozilla Public License, Apache, MIT, BSD and GPL/LGPL), avoiding proprietary solutions that can have difficulties in being adopted,
• Obj 6. Leverage on existing assets: Instead of starting from scratch, ESROCOS shall enhance already existing frameworks (TASTE extended with a robotics components approach inspired by the Rock middleware), mature toolsets (source-code versioning, scripting/testing, visualizers/simulators) and libraries (advanced data types, robotics transformations of reference systems, robotic arm kinematics and dynamics as well as rover locomotion control).
• Obj 7. Ease the development of robotics systems: ESROCOS shall be interoperable with other robotics frameworks (e.g. Rock/ROS 3^rd party libraries and visualizers/simulator) allowing their algorithms to be tested together with space critical components.
• Obj 8. Cross-pollinate with non-space solutions and applications: ESROCOS shall benefit from the experience gathered in developing RCOS for robots in nuclear environments, with very stringent RAMS requirements.

DLR Simulation and Software Technology Tasks

 The main tasks of the institute are:

• Contribution to the development of a state-of-the-art within the domain of space robotics, specifically focusing on Fault-Detection, Fault-Isolation and Recovery Techniques (FDIR) and real-time operating systems.
• Development of system requirements for the orbital track from the perspective of a potential customer, interested in an on-orbit servicing mission
• Additional contribution to the Packet Utilization Standard (PUS), FDIR and advanced datatypes requirements
• Correlation of the final test results against the preliminarily defined requirements
• Contribution to the dissemination of the project results 

Project Partners

• GMV Innovating Solutions S.L.
• DFKI GmbH - Robotics Innovation Center
• Université Grenoble Alpes
• KU Leuven
• Airbus Defence and Space
• GMVIS Skysoft S.A.
• Intermodalics BVBA
• Institut Supérieur de l'Aéronautique et de l'Espace
• VTT

Project Runtime

2016-2018