Italian Mars Society

License: New and Simplified BSD licenses

Web Page: http://www.erasproject.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=12&Itemid=104

Mailing List: mailto:erasproject@googlegroups.com

The Italian Mars Society (IMS) is a non-profit organization, existing from 2004, as Italian branch of the International Mars Society, created in the USA by Robert Zubrin. IMS is a member of the Mars Society European network. The foundation scope of the Italian Mars Society is to promote research projects devoted to Mars Exploration and the involvement of SMEs and large enterprises in the new economy related to space exploration. IMS is currently spearheading the European MaRs Analog Station for Advanced Technologies Integration (ERAS) project. The project aims to address the major issues that could jeopardize a crewed mission to Mars and are not adequately being addressed at existing terrestrial Mars analogs.

Projects

• Crew activity monitor The goal of this project is to build a service that allows the central monitoring of the crew activities. It will do this by collecting, processing and presenting data from the crew space suits.
• ERAS Station virtual simulation via the Blender Game Engine Goal of the project is the implementation of full Oculus Rift support for the Blender Game Engine using either the official Oculus SDK or the OpenHMD library. Further a demo application will be created to demonstrate the implementation and will directly be useful for the ERAS project for research and also demonstration purposes.
• Full body and hands gestures tracking Integration of full body motion and hand gesture tracking of astronauts to ERAS(European MaRs Analogue Station for Advanced Technologies Integration) virtual station. Skeleton tracking based feature extraction methods will be used for tracking whole body movements and hand gestures, which will have a visible representation in terms of the astronaut avatar moving in the virtual ERAS Station environment.
• Integration of ROS and Gazebo with Tango Controls I plan to make ROS libraries and features accessible without need for a ROS_MASTER, as well as incorporate Gazebo simulator within the existing framework to enrich the existing simulation abilities for Trevor.
• Multi-user integration for the ERAS Virtual simulation The main goal of this project is to add support and integrate the Oculus Rift VR headset with the Tango framework and with the Blender simulation. Once a single user is able to participate in the simulation using the Oculus, support for multiple users will be investigated and eventually added.
• pyEUROPA A py4j EUROPA client used to enable planning and scheduling on the Trevor Test Rover.