"We, as Rocket Lab Robotics, want to focus on the value-added technologies that make our robot arms possible to operate in space, not on maintaining a giant library of graphical user interfaces. We are a very small team… [MoveIt™ Pro] essentially is a force multiplier for us."
Kevin French, Senior Robotics and Software Engineer, Rocket Lab Robotics
Situation
Rocket Lab Robotics, formerly Motiv Space Systems, designs space-rated robotic arms, avionics and precision mechanisms in Pasadena, California, a few miles east of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Founded in 2014 and acquired by Rocket Lab in 2026, the group has deep flight heritage in robotic manipulation, including the arm it developed with JPL for the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover, which has operated on Mars for more than five years collecting samples for potential future return to Earth.
Today the team is applying that heritage to In-space Servicing, Assembly and Manufacturing (ISAM), and to a mission that will put a commercial robotic arm in orbit: NASA’s Fly Foundational Robots (FFR) mission, scheduled to launch in late 2027.
Problem
FFR is not a demonstration in a lab. It is a flight program with a launch date, flight hardware constraints, and a mission that has to work the first time.
The goal, in Kevin French’s words, is to “get a robot on orbit faster, cheaper, and more accessible to everyone than ever before.”
That put an unusual set of demands on the software:
- motion planning and control for a 7-DOF CrossLink arm that can walk across the spacecraft, re-basing itself from one docking point to another rather than operating from a fixed position
- autonomous execution of complex, multi-step operations, from post-launch commissioning to installing a powered Orbital Replacement Unit (ORU) through a third-party interface
- collection and downlink of detailed engineering telemetry from cameras, joint sensing and force measurement to monitor performance and improve on-orbit models
- the flexibility to change behavior after launch, including enabling guest roboticists to upload and run new software on the arm while it is in orbit
Underneath all of it is the resourcing problem. Rocket Lab is a very small team. Every hour spent maintaining interfaces, controllers and simulators was an hour not spent on the space-rated hardware that is the company’s actual product. Before MoveIt Pro, operator tooling was a developed in-house GUI that became difficult to maintain as it diverted from the core system production efforts.
Solution
Rocket Lab Robotics builds FFR on an open source backbone, using Space ROS™, the space-focused variant of ROS, with MoveIt Pro on top of it for motion planning, arm control, autonomy and operator tooling.
MoveIt Pro’s built-in and extensible Behaviors allow teams to build complex operations and logic from reusable components rather than bespoke mission code. That structure is what makes on-orbit reconfiguration practical: to run an operation the spacecraft has never performed before, the team sends up an XML file. Because MoveIt Pro also ships with MuJoCo physics simulation integrated, entire assembly missions run in simulation, with camera generation and collision checking, validating missions offline in advance as well as in sync with the in-flight system. PickNik and Rocket Lab Robotics co-developed software compliance controllers that use end-of-arm force-torque sensing to make arms which are stiff enough to survive launch behave like a spring-mass-damper during contact tasks.
Just as important is what the team no longer builds. MoveIt Pro supplies robot arm controllers tested across a wide range of arms, an introspection and debugging interface, simulators, and a large library of ready-to-go functionality, none of which Rocket Lab Robotics has to maintain. PickNik fixes the bugs. The Rocket Lab Robotics team can now focus on developing only the value-added components specific to space.
Outcome
The collaboration has produced results across two active programs, building robot skills in a digital twin, then executing on hardware with trivial effort. Objectives built in simulation and then demonstrated on hardware include:
- a fully autonomous 35-minute run in which the three-armed xWalker platform climbed a tower in a ground testbed, routed a cable up it one rung at a time, and plugged the cable into its final port, monitored rather than driven by engineers
- assembly of truss cube structures using both perception and force to plan and execute motion
- coordinated multi-arm manipulation in which two arms cooperated on a shared load, coordinating the force transmitted between them
- grasping without jigs, using fiducial markers, wrist cameras and visual servoing, with compliance absorbing the remaining position error
These capabilities contributed to the selection of MoveIt Pro as the motion planning, control and telemetry-collection software for the FFR flight mission, including ground-based operator tooling. MoveIt Pro also underpins how FFR opens the platform to the wider community. MoveIt Pro will also be available to FFR Guest Roboticists developing software for on-orbit experiments with the arm.
For a small team with a flight manifest, speed matters as much as capability. “This is also how we’re getting up there so fast and so quick,” French said, “because we are building on the backs of a huge open source community.” And as he noted, flight heritage compounds: “Once something is flown, it very often becomes a de facto standard, just because it is flown. So we’re about to fly MoveIt Pro.” When FFR reaches orbit, it will demonstrate not only that a commercial robotic arm can perform sophisticated servicing and manipulation tasks in space, but that an open-source-based robotics software stack can support real on-orbit operations.
MoveIt Pro is PickNik Robotics’ commercial robotics software platform that extends the capabilities of the open-source MoveIt project. Designed for unstructured environments, MoveIt Pro provides powerful tools for motion planning, grasping, perception, and behavior sequencing. With pre-built robot behaviors and a modular runtime architecture, MoveIt Pro significantly reduces engineering effort and time-to-deployment. Its hardware-agnostic design supports a wide range of commercial and custom robotic arms, making it ideal for scalable automation across space, manufacturing, and logistics sectors.
MoveIt Pro is PickNik Robotics’ commercial robotics software platform that extends the capabilities of the open-source MoveIt project. Designed for unstructured environments, MoveIt Pro provides powerful tools for motion planning, grasping, perception, and behavior sequencing. With pre-built robot behaviors and a modular runtime architecture, MoveIt Pro significantly reduces engineering effort and time-to-deployment. Its hardware-agnostic design supports a wide range of commercial and custom robotic arms, making it ideal for scalable automation across space, manufacturing, and logistics sectors.
