Intelligent control of life support for space missions

Abstract

Future manned space operations will include a greater use of automation than we currently see. 1 For example, semiautonomous robots and software agents will perform difficult tasks while operating unattended most of the time. As these automated agents become more prevalent, human contact with them will occur more often and become more routine, so designing these automated agents according to the principles of human-centered computing is important.In this article, we describe two cases of semiautonomous control software developed and fielded in test environments at the NASA Johnson Space Center. This software operated continuously at the JSC and interacted closely with humans for months at a time. Our approachFor the past seven years, we've worked on developing intelligent software for the control of advanced life support systems. We fielded this control software in an operational environment in which test engineers manually controlled and continuously monitored all life support systems from a console in a test control room. Such operations required the engineers to spend considerable time on routine data monitoring and lowlevel commanding. Our biggest challenges initially were to prove that automated control software was reliable enough to be useful and that automating routine control tasks would be worthwhile.Thus, from the beginning, we had the goal of using automation to reduce the engineer's workload. However, our objective was not to replace humans in operations but to free them from routine tasks (such as vigilant monitoring), thereby enabling them to concentrate on activities that capitalize on human strengths (such as supervisory monitoring). To perform these new tasks, humans still must interact with the control automation. In fact, human interaction becomes more challenging because the human is less involved in routine day-to-day operations and, as a result, might be less aware of the ongoing control situation and could lose anomaly response skills through lack of practice. This is a critical consideration for the human centering of semi-autonomous control systems.We also recognized that the change in test operations resulting from the use of automated control would be fundamental. The human role changes to one of supervisory monitoring with occasional intervention when operations cannot be automated or when exceptional situations occur. During normal operations, engineers supporting these tests will spend most of their time doing activities unrelated to control but will need to be on call should the automation or life support hardware experience problems. In addition, humans will need to supervise and command these continuously operating systems from remote locations (such as their offices) with only infrequent (and possibly asynchronous) interaction. For such operations, human supervisors must be able to quickly form an integrated view of distributed control without having to continuously monitor control data.This concept of test operations, however, represented too radical a change to be quickly acc...

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