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Ask your robot questions in plain English with NASA JPL's ROSA: media published by nasa-jpl/rosa
Demo video on YouTube (opens in a new tab)Credit: nasa-jpl/rosa
Ask your robot questions in plain English with NASA JPL's ROSA: media published by nasa-jpl/rosa (image 2)
Ask your robot questions in plain English with NASA JPL's ROSA: media published by nasa-jpl/rosa (image 3)
Ask your robot questions in plain English with NASA JPL's ROSA: media published by nasa-jpl/rosa (image 4)

Ask your robot questions in plain English with NASA JPL's ROSA

Sim, Easy

ROSA (ROS Agent) from NASA JPL is a LangChain-based assistant for ROS 1 and ROS 2 that lets you inspect and operate a robot with natural-language queries.

ROSA wraps common ROS tools (list nodes, echo topics, check params, call services) as agent tools, so you can ask 'why is my robot not moving?' and it investigates. JPL demoed it on a Spot robot in its Mars Yard. It ships a TurtleSim demo.

Hardware & cost: A laptop with ROS; $0 software plus LLM API usage.

Difficulty: Easy.

Agent install prompt (paste into Claude Code, Cursor or Codex): "Install ROSA from https://github.com/nasa-jpl/rosa (`pip install jpl-rosa` per the README), run the TurtleSim demo, then adapt it to my ROS 2 robot's topics."

Source: nasa-jpl/rosa on GitHub — https://github.com/nasa-jpl/rosa (facts checked against the project README, Oct 2026; prices vary by region).

Quick answers

What do you need to ask your robot questions in plain English with NASA JPL's ROSA?
A laptop with ROS; $0 software plus LLM API usage.
How hard is it to ask your robot questions in plain English with NASA JPL's ROSA?
Easy.

How your agent drives it

Copied from the nasa-jpl/rosa README

  1. Shell
    $ pip3 install jpl-rosa

Any coding agent that can run a shell can run these. Read the README before you run anything on a robot that moves.

Ideas to try with it

Our ideas, not the builder's claims.

  1. Ask 'what nodes are running?' instead of typing ros2 node list
  2. Have it summarize a log file after a failed run
  3. Drive TurtleSim with sentences while you learn ROS
1 more idea
  1. Give it a custom tool that reports your robot's battery
Source
nasa-jpl/rosa on GitHub
Last commit
2026-11-03
Builder
nasa-jpl
Repo
nasa-jpl/rosa, 1,682 stars
Built with
Any ROS 2 robot, TurtleSim

Guides: Robots you can build with AI

What to build next

Builds that share a board, robot or agent with this one.