Showcase

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 overall goal of our project is to level an area on the moon using a SWARM of EZ-RASSOR rovers so that a landing pad may be built. In doing this, we will illustrate that these low-cost rovers are to do high level tasks autonomously. Our project has several different aspects. We developed an algorithm that uses a digital elevation model of an area to create an unordered set of instructions which may be completed by a SWARM of rovers to level the area described by the digital elevation model in an efficient manner.

The goal of our project is to work with the Florida Space Institute (FSI) and their EZ-RASSOR rover simulation/RE-RASSOR real-world rover to integrate a robotic arm that will be used to place small rectangular bricks together to build infrastructure such as roads and landing pads on other planets/moons.