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Ocean Worlds Autonomy Testbed for Exploration Research and Simulation (OceanWATERS) - User Guide for Release 13
The OceanWATERS User Guide describes the purpose, usage, and operating environment of the OceanWATERS software. It is intended to help new users become quickly familiar with and productive using OceanWATERS.
Wiki custodian: K. Michael Dalal, Project Lead for OceanWATERS, NASA Ames Research Center
Documentation authors: Liam Carr, Damiana Catanoso, Anjan Chakrabarty, Michael Dalal, Laurence Edwards, Jason Fugate, Anthony Koutroulis, Chetan Kulkarni, Lanssie Ma, Ussama Naal, Molly O’Connor, Thomas Stucky, Terence Welsh.
See the project's top level CONTRIBUTORS file for a comprehensive list of present and past group members.
The OceanWATERS software was developed at NASA Ames Research Center (ARC) to provide a virtual testbed for developing and maturing autonomy technologies relevant to ocean worlds lander missions. In particular, it is intended to support development of autonomy that enables “fail-active” operations: continued operations without ground control intervention in the presence of sub-system failures.
This virtual testbed simulator provides both environment (e.g., lighting and surface material properties) and lander (hardware and software) simulation capabilities. In addition, the virtual testbed provides a basic fault injection framework, and state logging capabilities to provide system introspection. A portion of the proposed Europa Lander mission is implemented as a concrete example of a possible ocean worlds mission, but the testbed is architected to be readily adaptable to other ocean worlds and lander configurations. While surface conditions on ocean worlds are not known in great detail, the Europa environment simulation is intended to embody the best current information available.
OceanWATERS is an open-source, cross-platform, modular, multi-process simulator. It leverages the Robotic Operating System (ROS) for inter-process communication and basic robotic and environment simulation capabilities. A reference autonomy implementation is provided as an example to exercise the system, and can be replaced or modified by the user.
OceanWATERS complements a physical testbed that was developed by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The two testbeds are developed collaboratively with the intent that autonomy software developed for OceanWATERS should be readily portable to the physical testbed and vice versa.
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