To enable the plug-and-play of the spacecraft systems, a middleware software system should be equipped beforehand to automatically deal with the self-discovering, self-configuration and communication between the components. A SPA software solution based on the Robot Operating System (ROS), or RSPA in short, was proposed. The RSPA software architecture that can handle the heterogeneous nature of SPA network was presented after the analysis and comparison between the software architectures of ROS and SPA. Then the problem of the implementation of SPA protocol through ROS environment was addressed. Finally, an emulation system which was used to verify the effectiveness of RSPA was demonstrated. Compared with the previous space plug-and-play architecture software implementation, RSPA has a clear network model, is easier to expand, and can effectively utilize ROS's stable infrastructure and rich tools to accelerate software development.
