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A new software architecture for developing and testing algorithms for space exploration missions

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Abstract

In recent years, planet exploration has received an increasing interest due to the possibility of exploiting planet resources and assuring a human–robotic colonized presence on suitable planetary surfaces. These goals can be reached through the development of smart robots, which are able to work on their own and without requiring a constant human supervision but, at the same time, assuring a great level of safety and reliability. To this aim, the development of effective architectures, concerning both software and hardware issues, could represent a great improvement toward this ambitious objective. This paper presents a novel modular architecture called Test Bench for Robotics and Autonomy (TBRA), the main objective of which is to create a test bench for rover autonomy missions where different implementations of a particular subsystem can be easily tested, while keeping the rest of the system unchanged. Thus, it allows the developers to be able to compare the results of tests and understand which version works better. Such architecture has been built on top of the Workframe, a generic middleware for real-time robotics. This two-layered approach allows the final user to deal only with the TBRA interface, which is designed to be extremely simple to use and takes care of most real-time programming problems, while allowing flexibility in the development, maintenance and future extension of the TBRA itself.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Communication, Computer and System Science, University of Genoa, Via Opera Pia 13, 16145, Genova, Italy

    Enrico Simetti, Enrica Zereik, Alessandro Sperindé, Sandro Torelli, Davide Ducco, Fabio Frassinelli, Alessio Turetta & Giuseppe Casalino

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  1. Enrico Simetti
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  2. Enrica Zereik
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  3. Alessandro Sperindé
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  4. Sandro Torelli
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  5. Davide Ducco
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  6. Fabio Frassinelli
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  7. Alessio Turetta
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  8. Giuseppe Casalino
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Correspondence to Enrico Simetti.

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Simetti, E., Zereik, E., Sperindé, A. et al. A new software architecture for developing and testing algorithms for space exploration missions. Intel Serv Robotics 4, 135–146 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11370-011-0086-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11370-011-0086-7

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