A new simulation framework for autonomy in robotic missions

Autonomy is a key enabling factor in the advancement of robotics for remote exploration. As the level of resources devoted to this effort continues to increase, it has become equally important to provide simulation tools and environments to scientists in which to test the autonomy algorithms. While industrial robotics benefits from a variety of high quality simulation tools, researchers developing autonomy software are still dependent primarily on block-world simulations. The Mission Simulation Facility (MSF) project addresses this shortcoming by providing a simulation toolkit that will enable developers of autonomous control systems to test their systems' performance against integrated, standardized simulations of NASA mission scenarios. The MSF provides a distributed architecture that connects the autonomous system to a set of simulated components replacing the robot hardware and its environment.