Supported independence on Mars: Design and evaluation of model-based ePartner support for astronauts on Mars

For manned missions to Mars, one of the challenges is to maintain safety in the complex and dynamic space environment. Communication to Mars will suffer from significant delays, potentially endangering a mission if assistance is needed immediately; therefore a high level of independence from ground control is necessary to be able to cope with non-nominal situations. An electronic partner (ePartner) can support human-robot teams by reasoning about the current situation and provide appropriate assistance. Different ePartner versions have previously been developed and tested, resulting in an extensive Requirements Baseline. In addition to these previous ePartner designs, the ePartner in this research will model the solution space in terms of functions (objectives), work processes and resources. This research will present a formal representation of the different abstraction levels to be able to reason about the mission status, make suggestions in non-nominal situations, and provide explanations. This should increase the users effectiveness, efficiency, trust and situational awareness. To evaluate this concept, an ePartner has been implemented as a mobile application on a tablet and user experiments have been conducted at the Delft University of Technology. The final conclusions of these experiments confirm an increase in effectiveness, efficiency and trust. Because of measurement limitations, the expected improvement on the situational awareness could not be proven. Following from these experiments, refinements of the existing Requirements Baseline are advised.

Subject

ePartner
human-robot team
abstraction hierarchy
ORM model
space mission
user experience engineering

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Student theses

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master thesis

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