Phoebe Bridgeback

Descriptions, deployments, tooling, and configuration files for the Phoebe Bridgeback dual arm mobile manipulation robot platform, part of the iMETRO Facility at NASA's Johnson Space Center. This project is intended for use in one of ER4's managed workspaces (such as the in the phoebe_bridgeback_ws).

The robot includes:

• 2x UR10e serial manipulators with Robotiq Hand-E Gripper and wrist mounted RealSense RGB-D cameras
• 2x Ewellix Lifts
• A Clearpath Ridgeback mobile base

Usage

The instructions to run the whole phoebe environment can be found in the (Docker workspace)[]. The specific launches that are useful from this repository are the following:

# run the standard control script with a kinematics simulation
ros2 launch phoebe_deploy control.launch.py platform:=mock_hardware

# run the standard control script on hardware
ros2 launch phoebe_deploy control.launch.py platform:=hardware

# for any of these launches, you can add a namespace or tf prefix
# like the following (only shown for mock_hardware). Note that these
# have not been coordinated with the moveit config yet.
ros2 launch phoebe_deploy control.launch.py platform:=mock_hardware ns:=r100_0564
ros2 launch phoebe_deploy control.launch.py platform:=mock_hardware tf_prefix:=r100_0564_
ros2 launch phoebe_deploy control.launch.py platform:=mock_hardware ns:=r100_0564 tf_prefix:=r100_0564_

# run the standard moveit config (same for all platforms)
ros2 launch phoebe_moveit_config phoebe_moveit.launch.py

# Hardware cameras launch file
ros2 launch phoebe_deploy phoebe_rspc_camera.launch.py

Citation

This project falls under the purview of the iMETRO project. If you use this 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}}