Open-source commons for designing, simulating, and operating planetary robotic swarms for exploration and in-situ resource utilization (ISRU).

Astro-Mine is a platform for designing, simulating, and ultimately operating large heterogeneous robotic swarms — orbiters, landers, rovers, hoppers, excavators, haulers, and ISRU plants — for exploration and resource utilization on the Moon, Mars, and small bodies. The goal is not a single application but a commons: the shared simulation, benchmark, and orchestration substrate that planetary-swarm robotics is built on — the way ROS and Gazebo became the substrate for terrestrial robotics and Gymnasium became the substrate for reinforcement learning.

Status: Phases 0 and 1 shipped — the commons seed, the autonomy stack, the console, and the anchor benchmark all run. Phase 2 (operations bridge) is next.

The code is public; the distributions are not yet published to a package index, so you install from source for now (VERSIONING.md §6.2). Nothing here is a released, supported artifact yet — distributions are 0.y and interfaces can still move.

• Design — specify a goal ("produce 10 tonnes of water per month from this crater") and explore swarm compositions, orbital infrastructure, and cooperative policies in high-fidelity simulation.
• Operate — run a validated campaign, first as a digital-twin shadow of reality and eventually commanding real assets through a hardware abstraction layer.

The architecture is a thin, stable core with thick, swappable edges: Core is small and changes slowly; worlds, robots, planners, policies, and ISRU processes are all plugins.

A component is a unit of design; a distribution is a unit of release. Four things ship, and every component is imported as astro_mine.<name> from the first of them:

† Phase 2. Spice (frames/time/geometry) and Seal (signing, SLSA, SBOM) are Core companions — the heavy, shared realizations of Core vocabulary that Core itself stays free of. The console is not a component: it is the single GUI, and it is the astro-mine-ui application itself — adding a page is adding a route (ui.md). View survives as the @astro-mine/view visualization library.

• Phase 0 — Commons seed ✅ (Core, Spice, Sim, Worlds, Fleet, Bench, Prospect, Link, Cloud) with an anchor scenario: lunar polar water-ice prospecting.
• Phase 1 — Autonomy & studio ✅ (Mind, Learn, Allocate, Guard, Studio, Hub, Surrogate, Seal, View), followed by the packaging consolidation into the four distributions above.
• Phase 2 — Operations bridge (Ops, Bridge, and the full operations viewer) validated on terrestrial analogs.
• Phase 3 — Flight & ecosystem — flight-software integration, the multi-regime mission track (Transit, Trajectory, Sizing, Ledger), and new worlds as plugins.

• 📖 User guide — start at getting started
• 📜 Governance — how changes are governed, and what a change to Core has to clear
• 🤝 Contributing guide
• 🛡️ Security policy
• 🌐 Export-control & dual-use notice

Licensed under Apache-2.0 — permissive by design, so that commercial layers built on top can fund and sustain the commons.