NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

JPL ASTRA: Advanced System for Testbed Recording and Analysis

At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), mission success relies on rigorous robotic testbed operations. Documenting these complex tests is a critical but manually intensive process that can distract operators from their primary tasks. This student team partnered with JPL to create ASTRA (Advanced System for Testbed Recording and Analysis). ASTRA is an intelligent engineering assistant developed for NASA JPL robotic testbeds. This system reduces operator workload during long duration missions by automatically capturing voice observations and syncing them with live hardware data. Using WebRTC and the OpenAI STT API, AISTRA transcribes speech in real time. It then queries the InfluxDB telemetry pipeline to fetch the exact sensor values from that specific moment. Finally, a LLM synthesizes both inputs into a structured, searchable engineering note. ​This event driven approach ensures every spoken observation is instantly backed by hard data, creating a highly traceable timeline for aerospace engineers.