GSoC 2015 with the Italian Mars Society

Siddhant Shrivastava

April 29, 2015

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GSoC Banner

I got accepted into the eleventh edition of the Google Summer of Code program (GSoC 2015) with the Python Software Foundation umbrella organization. The list of selected students was announced on 28th April, 2015.

Python Logo

More specifically, I’ll be working with the Italian Mars Society under the ERAS (European MaRs Analogue Station) project. Quoting from the source -

The European MaRs Analogue Station for Advanced Technologies Integration (ERAS) is a program spearheaded by the Italian Mars Society (IMS) which main goal is to provide an effective test bed for field operation studies in preparation for manned missions to Mars.

ERAS logo

The focus of this GSoC project is Virtual Reality based Telerobotics for V-ERAS.

Virtual European Mars Analog Station (V-ERAS) is based on immersive real-time environment simulations running on top of the Blender Game Engine (BGE).

This project has three distinct components -

  1. A ROS-Kinect interface for the Teleoperative control of the Clearpath Husky Robot rover’s motion via human body-tracking.

  2. Streaming the 3-D stereo camera video feed from the rover to BGE over the network.

  3. Processing the video feed into an Augmented Reality experience through a head-mounted Virtual Reality device.

The goal of this V-ERAS project is thus to develop a software and hardware system that enhances the capabilities of the crew members preparing for Mars missions.

I feel elated to be a part of the Italian Mars Society and be able to contribute towards manned space exploration which is one of the vital aims of the next two decades. GSoC marks my first foray into the world of collaborative Open Source software development.

I shall be mentored by two really cool people - Yuval Brodsky and Fabio Nigi with whom I share my interests in space exploration, robotics, networks, and free software. In addition, I’ll be constantly interacting with the IMS-ERAS community - Franco Carbognani, Ezio Melotti, Mario Tambos, Ambar Mehrotra, Shridhar Mishra, Vito Gentile.

Thank you Google for this unique birthday gift :)

Looking forward to a great and challenging summer of Code!

I’ll share the details of the project in the next post in this series.