Discussing F´ integration with JPL-developed planning and analysis tools

[barugonman]

Hi all -

I'm working with other JPLers to continue developing planning and analysis software, that was largely originated from JPL projects such as M20 and Clipper. The plan is to complete the migration of these tools into open source for continued development, and complete other valuable functionality that had been identified during the engineering phases (but never funded). Me personally, I happen to have retired from JPL recently but intend to continue working on these tools for the time being. Tools include the Aerie/PlanDev suite that has been open source for some time, and also the spacecraft analysis tools for which the open source process was completed.

Anyhow, these sorts of tools are best developed with the support of a flight system simulation environment, such as the Workstation Test Set/WSTS flight software development frameworks used at JPL. And further, we needed something fairly generic and extendable. I had been considering ROS as I had worked in that environment before, however it was recommended I review F' as an alternative. I did start reviewing and so far out of the box F´ looks to fit my needs pretty well. The command-and-telemetry GDS system is familiar enough for me, and I was able to hook up the hello-world demo to one of our Python plotting libraries without much trouble, so my current plan is to continue down the F´ path. (Furthermore I've worked with at least a couple of the developers on this project, that give me a warm fuzzy feeling about the whole thing :-) )

I'll be skimming through the repos to see what sorts of things have already been built on/around F', but would be interested in any pointers people have to similar sorts of efforts to review. (Or anything else I should keep in mind).

Additionally, if working with these new tools sounds interesting, people are welcome to check out what's been built and give things a try once we get a bit farther with the tool integrations.

Let me know what you think -

Thank you -

Dan Allard

[vincewoo]

Hi Dan! I didn't realize that you retired, congratulations! I also didn't realize that these tools had been open-sourced, really appreciate your continued work on them even in retirement. I'm working on the Clipper Ops team these days and having a tool like Aerie/Merlin is a huge improvement to the many Ops planning activities we've had to do.

Our section is definitely investing a lot into F' for the foreseeable feature so it would be a great option for using as a basis for your development. It is also gaining popularity outside of JPL as well with many universities and commercial applications.

Totally support this effort!

[barugonman]

Awesome great to hear from you Vince, you were one of the folk I was happy to see onboard :-) ! Yea we got the Clipper built set of tools out, plus others like the memory analysis tools and the rest of the EAS tools are expected! Will update in this thread as I go, take care -

Dan a