NASA is currently partnering with industry to design the next generation of crewed spacecraft that will replace the shuttles and transport astronauts to the moon and beyond. These spacecraft are providing designers with many challenging issues in the areas of vehicle operations and crew-vehicle interfaces. For example, the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle will be subject to higher G forces and interior vibration levels than the shuttles, necessitating a "seated" operations mode in which most crew-vehicle interactions occur via one or more handheld devices. As these devices represent a form of remote control, virtually all the operations they support must take place through electronic interfaces. In today's spacecraft cockpits, most of these operations are conducted through manual interfaces, such as hard switches.
The Intelligent Spacecraft Interface Systems (ISIS) laboratory at NASA Ames Research Center provides a part-task simulation environment for human-in-the-loop evaluation of new operations concepts, and supporting crew-vehicle interfaces, on next-generation vehicles. Unique among facilities that simulate spacecraft operations, ISIS is equipped with a suite of human performance and human-system interaction measurement tools, including audio-video recordings, event files, high-fidelity eye-movement recording and data analysis software, and electronic interfaces for collecting workload ratings. This tool set, and the associated human factors expertise provided by ARC ISIS personnel, provides a unique capability to conduct microanalyses of crew information acquisition activities during targeted vehicle operations, down to the individual eye fixation level. This level of task decomposition and analysis is required to determine, for example, the usefulness and efficacy of individual elements and components of cockpit display formats, information that can then inform and guide display evaluations and display redesign cycles.
The data provided by the ISIS integrated tool set also provides an empirical database which human factors and computer science personnel are using to develop and validate computational models of human behavior and human performance. The goal of these models is to be able to predict crew reaction time, error rate, and intra-crew variability (5th percentile to 95th percentile) for a wide variety of operational concepts, crew-automation functional allocations, and display design formats.
The most recent project (
PDF- 1.9 MB) in the ISIS lab was a human factors evaluation of an operational concept for onboard management of systems malfunctions during dynamic phases of flight on the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle. The evaluation focused on an Advanced Caution and Warning System that automatically determined the root cause of a systems failure and linked that root cause with the correct set of isolation and recovery activities on an electronic procedure viewer.
