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Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering
Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering
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ItemQuantitative Assessment of Human Control on Landing Trajectory Design(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2010-12-02) Chua, Zarrin K.An increased thirst for scientific knowledge and a desire to advance humanity's presence in space prompts the need for improved technology to send crewed vehicles to places such as the Moon, Mars, and nearby passing asteroids. Landing at any of these locations will require vehicle capabilities greater than that previously used during the Apollo program or those applied in Low Earth Orbit. In particular, the vehicle and the on-board crew must be capable of executing precision landing in sub-optimal landing conditions during time-critical, high-stakes mission scenarios, such as Landing Point Designation (LPD) , or the critical phase of determining the vehicle's final touchdown point. Most proposed solutions involve automated control of landing vehicles, accepting no input from the on-board crew - effectively relegating them to payload. While this method is satisfactory for some missions, an automation-only approach during this critical mission phase may be placing the system at a disadvantage by neglecting the human capability of [what?]. Therefore, the landing system may result in a lack of dynamic flexibility to unexpected landing terrain or in-flight events. It is likely that executing LPD will require an ideal distribution of authority between the on-board crew and an automated landing system. However, this distribution is application-specific and not easily calculated. Current science does not provide enough detailed or explicit theories regarding allocation of automation, and the advantages provided by biological and digital pilots (either acting as the sole authoritarian or as a coordinated team) are difficult to describe in quantitative measures. Despite previous experience in piloting vehicles on the Moon, few cognitive models describing the decision-making process exist. The specialization of the pilot and the application pose significant practical challenges in regular observations in the target environment. The lack of quantitative knowledge results in predominantly qualitative design trade-offs during pre-mission planning. While qualitative analyses have proven to be useful to the mission designer, an understanding founded on quantitative metrics regarding the relationship between human control and mission design will provide the sufficient supplementary information necessary for overall success. In particular, increased knowledge of the impact of human control on landing trajectory design would allow for more efficient and thorough conceptual mission planning. This knowledge would allow visualization of the flight envelope possible for various degrees of human control and help establish conceptual estimations of critical mission parameters such as fuel consumption or task completion time. This report details an experiment undertaken to further understanding of the impact of moderate degrees of human control on landing trajectory design or vice versa during LPD. This report briefly summarizes current understanding and modeling of moderate control during LPD and similar applications, reviews previous and current efforts in implementing LPD, examines the pilot study to observe subjects in a simulated LPD task, and discusses the significance of findings from the pilot study.
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ItemAnalysis of Human-System Interaction For Landing Point Redesignation(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009-05-26) Chua, Zarrin K.Despite two decades of manned spaceflight development, the recent thrust for increased human exploration places significant demands on current technology. More information is needed in understanding how human control affects mission performance and most importantly, how to design support systems that aid in human-system collaboration. This information on the general human-system relationship is difficult to ascertain due to the limitations of human performance modeling and the breadth of human actions in a particular situation. However, cognitive performance can be modeled in limited, well-defined scenarios of human control and the resulting analysis on these models can provide preliminary information with regard to the human-system relationship. This investigation examines the critical case of lunar Landing Point Redesignation (LPR) as a case study to further knowledge of the human-system relationship and to improve the design of support systems to assist astronauts during this task. To achieve these objectives, both theoretical and experimental practices are used to develop a task execution time model and subsequently inform this model with observations of simulated astronaut behavior. The experimental results have established several major conclusions. First, the method of LPR task execution is not necessarily linear, with tasks performed in parallel or neglected entirely. Second, the time to complete the LPR task and the overall accuracy of the landing site is generally robust to environmental and scenario factors such as number of points of interest, number of identifiable terrain markers, and terrain expectancy. Lastly, the examination of the overall tradespace between the three main criteria of fuel consumption, proximity to points of interest, and safety when comparing human and analogous automated behavior illustrates that humans outperform automation in missions where safety and nearness to points of interest are the main objectives, but perform poorly when fuel is the most critical measure of performance. Improvements to the fidelity of the model can be made by transgressing from a deterministic to probablistic model and incorporating such a model into a six degree-of-freedom trajectory simulator. This paper briefly summarizes recent technological developments for manned spaceflight, reviews previous and current efforts in implementing LPR, examines the experimental setup necessary to test the LPR task modeling, discusses the significance of findings from the experiment, and also comments on the extensibility of the LPR task and experiment results to human Mars spaceflight.