This study discusses the envisioned concept of future space operations that includes the collaborative decision-making between humans and automation. Future mission objectives include flying beyond Low-Earth Orbit (LEO). Two major challenges for such operations include communication delays and off-nominal situations, where no procedures exist for the situation. Current space operations rely heavily on communication between Mission Control and space crew, but missions beyond LEO introduces communication delays that impact collaboration. To respond to off-nominal situations, the space crew will need real-time guidance and support to develop new procedural steps. However, communication delay will prevent Mission Control from providing real-time assistance. A Cognitive Assistant (CA) system could be developed to assist the space crew in these situations. A systematic approach was used to ground the development of envisioned collaboration between humans and an adaptive CA for space operations. This new approach extrapolates the domain knowledge of current space operations to future operations in the presence of communication delays. In the first phase of study, interviews with astronauts were performed to generate an Abstraction Hierarchy (AH) and a Decision Action Diagram (DAD) to define the cognitive functions performed by the space crew, Mission Control and on-board automation during the current operations. Functions that would be interrupted due to communications delay were identified as the breakpoints on DAD. This paper presents the envisioned concept of operations and the role of CA in space crew, based on the domain knowledge models developed under the first phase of this study.
This paper represents the development and the design of a Playbook interface which supports the coordination between human and autonomous teammates in Single Pilot Operations. The move from Dual-Pilot Operations to Single Pilot Operations necessitates that the autonomous teammate will perform some of the functions which are performed by pilots in Dual-Pilot Operations. The Playbook concept is inspired from the American football where team players get trained specific action sequences together, communicate in a common shorthand, and quickly adapt to changing conditions during games. The Playbook interface supports the ability of human and autonomous teammates to express their intentions and delegate functions to respond to a situation during flight. A walkthrough of a Playbook prototype with a use case is presented for Single Pilot Operations.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.