Envisioned Concept of Operations for Beyond Low-Earth Orbit: The Collaborative Decision Making Between Human and Cognitive Assistant

Abstract

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.

Development of a Functionality Matrix for a Cognitive Assistant on Long Distance Space Missions

“…Figure 1 presents the overall approach followed for the development of CA system. The tasks in gray boxes were performed previously and explained with the previous work (Tokadlı & Dorneich, in review;Tokadlı & Dorneich, 2017). The tasks in dashed-line box is the future work that will be developed following the development of functionality matrix.…”

“…Because FM shows where Mission Control is lacking to perform a critical function and allocates the function to either space crew or CA. The envisioned concept of operation is expanded in Tokadlı & Dorneich (2017).…”

“…An onboard CA must be capable of assisting the space crew in dealing with an off-nominal situation in a timely manner when Mission Control is not able to provide real-time support. For this purpose, the domain knowledge on the collaborative decision-making process for current space operations was generated, and the decision-making process to respond to any situation during operations was diagramed (Tokadlı & Dorneich, 2017). These developments guided the creation of a FM and the design requirements for a CA system.…”