Day: August 1, 2022

The Sim SmackDown, or Simulation Exploration Experience, is a long running, international cooperative event combining Industry, Academia and Government to simulate future Lunar and Martian settlement concepts.  NASA provides mentors, tools, architectures and challenges; Industry provides tools and standards; and Academia provides technologies and students from around the world.  The UCF team is responsible for both the Lunar Base and the complete computing infrastructure for the entire simulation.   

NASA created an indoor robotics arena for the their Lunabotics Competition.  The desire was to run small rovers in smaller competitions for middle and high school students.  The team ported the EZ-RASSOR software to the NASA hardware platform and developed competition management tools for use by the Education team.  The Software was complete on time, the NASA hardware is still in development.

The Marsupial Rover is student developed and based on a NASA SwampWorks challenge.  The goal is to leverage EZ-RASSOR software, NASA concepts, RE-RASSOR and Phoenix (small and large rovers) to create an autonomous resource harvesting system for the Moon or Mars. 

EZ-RASSOR is student developed, NASA Sponsored, open sources software for rover management and operation; details are available on the GitHub. The goal is to create a generalized rover management system suitable for remote control use, but extendable to autonomous navigation, swarm operation and local decision making. EZ-RASSOR began as a ROS 1.0 project. The 2021/22 team converted the code base to work in the ROS 2.0 environment while addressing ROS shortfalls in areas that impacted overall performance and RE-RASSOR goals.

The ISRU (In Situ Resource Utilization) Performance team created a discrete event simulation for lunar resources and the intended harvester and refinery systems.  The simulation includes rover transit times, raw material locations, material characteristic (depth, % water, travel time) prospecting systems and beneficiation systems.  This allows investigation of ISRU system performance and associated sensitivities to resource locations, resource quality, deployed systems and overall process time.