Curiosity Rover - iPhone OS mobile application (2009)
Photo by Aude Lesty / Cité de l’espace
Company: CNES (French Space Agency)
Years: 2009 - 2010
Location: Toulouse, France
In 2007, the CNES (Centre national d’études spatiales) and IRAP (Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie), involved in the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission, decided to ask industrial Brevet de technicien supérieur (BTS) students to build a mockup of the Curiosity rover (scale 1:1) to highlight space activities.
Different schools were in charge of building different parts and the lycée Victor Duruy was in charge of the final assembly of the Rover. The students of the Institut Limayrac built a mobile application (the target device was an HP Palm iPAQ 114 that ran Windows Mobile 6.0 Classic) to control the Rover and to retrieve the feed of the cameras via WiFi. The mockup was delivered in June 2009.
In September 2009, the CNES asked the Institut Limayrac to port the mobile application from Windows Mobile to iOS.
I teamed up with another student and we managed the project from end-to-end with the client. We started working on the project scope, defining the detailed work breakdown, assessing risks, defining and getting a sign-off on the scope statement. The software architecture was modeled with UML 2.0 by using components, class, activity, and use case diagrams.
We developed the application for the iPhone OS 3.0 platform in Objective-C and we presented the final project at the CNES and did a demo it at the Toulouse Space Show in June 2010. Using the application, you were able to control the rover (forward/backward/turning left and right), see the feed from the camera, and execute preset scenarios (one of them was the following: moving forward for a determined period, deploying the arm, turning on the laser, retracting the arm, and going back to its initial position).
The jury composed of our computer science teachers and CNES stakeholders was impressed by our work and awarded us the highest grade of the 2010 promotion.
- Project size: 2 students
- Project length: 10 months
- iPhone OS 3 / Xcode 3.0 / Objective-C / UML 2.0
- Final grade: 18.5/20
