Put real-time motion planning onboard

Robotic spacecraft have always needed ground control to script every move, because flight computers were too weak to plan in real time. That constraint is now lifting. Microchip's PIC64-HPSC processor delivers roughly 100x the performance-per-watt of current space-qualified computers, giving flight hardware enough headroom to plan motion onboard. SoftServe built a reference application combining NASA's core Flight System with the RoboPlan motion planning library on this hardware, so a manipulator can accept a high-level goal and solve its own collision-free motion, on the vehicle, in real time.