iMETRO is a robotics facility housed at NASA's Johnson Space Center with the goal of adapting advanced terrestrial robotic technologies for space exploration applications such as logistics, maintenance, and science utilization tasks. These applications are designed for human exploration environments on space stations or the Lunar and Martian surfaces. The high fidelity mockups, test beds, and end-to-end systems provided can be used to develop capabilities that enable remote operation of robots in space supervised by humans on Earth. Particular focus is given to Intra-Vehicular Activity (IVA) environments of surface habitats, pressurized rover cabins, and space station internal modules.
Some of these systems include ground control user interfaces and software for managing robot remote control with realistic latency, bandwidth, and coverage interruptions for various mission environments (e.g., Low Earth Orbit, cis-Lunar, Lunar Surface, Mars Surface).
NOTE: The core content referenced in this repository is in the process of being released through NASA's release process. Additional packages will be released as noted below.
The iMETRO facility includes robot software for:
- Open-source robot configurations (e.g., URDF, deploy files) for iMETRO robots
- ros2_control controllers for controlling the various joints of the robots
- Basic MoveIt2 configurations for robots for interfacing with the systems from an application layer
- Models of mock-ups for space use cases, such as the crew access hatch and logistics stowage task trainer
- ros2_control hardware interfaces for interacting with the physical hardware (not used in sim)
- Mockups of space use cases as described above
- Physical robots with software interfaces (see below for more info)
- Frame-mounted PTZ cameras
- Remote operator stations for situational awareness
- Isolated robot network with configurable latency and bandwidth restrictions (currently a future planned capability)
- Universal Robots UR10e
- Robotiq hand-E Gripper with Custom Fingers
- Vention horizontally mounted 2.0m linear rail
- Ewellix Telescoping Lift Kit with 700mm Stroke
- Intel® RealSense™ Wrist-Mounted Depth Camera
The primary description and deployment package are available in chonkur_l_raile.
We also include the base containerized workflow for deploying the controllers on hardware, a kinematic simulation, and a dynamic simulation in clr_ws.
Lastly, sample applications and demonstrations are included in the clr_demo_ws.
- Universal Robots UR5e (2x)
- Robotiq Hand-E Grippers w/ Custom Fingers
- Arms mounted to dual, independent lift-kits of 500mm Stroke
- Clearpath Ridgeback Wheeled Mobile Base
- Intel® RealSense™ Wrist-Mounted Depth Cameras
Base description, package, and deployment files can be found in phoebe_bridgeback.
Like CLR, a containerized workflow for deploying the robot on hardware, a kinematic simulation, and a full dynamic simulartion are available in phoebe_bridgeback_ws.
- Integrate your own sensors and/or end effectors into our hardware system utilizing standard ROS interfaces
- Bring your own entire robot to interact with the other space application mockups
- See the iMETRO poster for an early poster of the work
- See our video of utilizing the facility to perform a maintenance demonstration
If you use this software in your own work, please cite the following paper:
@INPROCEEDINGS{imetro-facility-2025,
author={Dunkelberger, Nathan and Sheetz, Emily and Rainen, Connor and Graf, Jodi and Hart, Nikki and Zemler, Emma and Azimi, Shaun},
booktitle={2025 22nd International Conference on Ubiquitous Robots (UR)},
title={Design of the iMETRO Facility: A Platform for Intravehicular Space Robotics Research},
year={2025},
volume={},
number={},
pages={390-397},
keywords={NASA;Moon;Seals;Maintenance engineering;Maintenance;Robots;Standards;Open source software;Testing;Logistics},
doi={10.1109/UR65550.2025.11077983}}Questions are best asked through issues.
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