ISAAC (Integrated System for Autonomous and Adaptive Caretaking)

The ISAAC project has three main technical thrusts:

1. Integrated data: The current state of the art is that data from sensors associated with different facility subsystems (Structures, GN&C, and ECLSS, etc.) remain siloed. ISAAC technology unifies facility data and models with autonomous robotics, linking data streams from facility subsystems, sensor networks, and robots, as well as linking 3D geometry and sensor data map layers, and detecting changes and anomalies.
2. Integrated control interface: Current state of the art manages facilities with largely independent interface tools for different subsystems. Interfaces have different heritage, design assumptions and operator interface styles. Subsystem interactions are hard to analyze due to poor connectivity between separate tools. ISAAC technology combines interface tools for facility subsystems and autonomous robots; improves system-level situation awareness, situation understanding, and operator productivity; enables linking and embedding between tools to improve subsystem interaction analysis; and supports the entire activity life cycle from planning through execution and analysis.
3. Coordinated execution: The current state of the art for executing facility activities that require coordination between subsystems is either manual commanding (operator tracks dependencies between subsystems) or simple sequencing that can be brittle to even minor contingencies during execution. ISAAC technology models dependencies, uses automated planning to translate a high-level task definition to a plan that can work given the current system state (e.g. include actions to open hatches so that a robot can move where needed), and leverages ISAAC’s integrated data technology to watch for execution contingencies and trigger replanning as needed. This technology will reduce the time to effect changes on the system during critical faults and emergencies.

This isaac repo serves as a master for integrating an end-to-end demo that draws on code from the other repos as well as directly including a significant amount of the ISAAC code, mostly relating to the Astrobee robot. This repository includes:

• Astrobee software for added behaviors such as inpection and cargo transport as well as new sensor utilization.
• Dense mapping to create a textured 3D map
• Volumetric mapping to map volumetric signals, such as WiFi.
• Image analysis module to train a neural network to detect anomalies
• Survey Manager semi-autonomous planning and execution of imaging tasks.

You may also be interested in the separate repository for the ISAAC User Interface, which enables monitoring of multiple robots through a web browser.

System requirements

The isaac repo depends on the astrobee repo, therefore it inherits the same system requirements. You must use Ubuntu 16.04 to 20.04 64-bit. When running in simulation, certain Gazebo plugins require appropriate graphics drivers. See INSTALL.md in that repository for more information.

Usage

There are two main ways to install and run isaac:

1. For development: Build the isaac code on your native Ubuntu OS (or inside a normal virtual machine) in a way that makes it convenient for you to edit and incrementally recompile.

2. For demo: For the ISAAC integrated demo, many ISAAC repos are checked out, built, and run in a distributed fashion across multiple docker containers. The isaac code itself is built and run inside one of these containers. Note that the in-docker build is managed by the Dockerfile and completely separate from any build in your native OS, and you don't need to install for development prior to installing for demo.

Instructions on installing and using the ISAAC Software. For running the docker demos

Documentation

The documentation is auto-generated from the contents of this repository.

To compile the documentation locally (make sure you have the latest doxygen installed):

doxygen isaac.doxyfile

Contributing

The ISAAC Software is open source, and we welcome contributions from the public. Please submit pull requests to the develop branch. For us to merge any pull requests, we must request that contributors sign and submit either an Individual Contributor License Agreement or a Corporate Contributor License Agreement due to NASA legal requirements. Thank you for your understanding.

License

Copyright (c) 2021, United States Government, as represented by the Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. All rights reserved.

The "ISAAC - Integrated System for Autonomous and Adaptive Caretaking platform" software is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.