Context-Sensitive Augmented Reality for Mission Operations

Current NASA missions to the International Space Station are heavily dependent upon ground controllers to assist crew members in performing routine operations and maintenance as well as responses to off-nominal situations. Standard operating procedures are at the heart of spacecraft operations, with almost 5000 procedures for ISS alone. Performing these procedures often requires close collaboration between ground controllers who have deep knowledge of the spacecraft's systems and crew members who have on-board situation awareness. This close collaboration will become more difficult in extended missions and crew members will need to have more autonomy. Augmented reality technology can help replace some of the guidance that ground controllers offer to crew members during procedure execution. Augmented reality can also provide continuous and just-in-time training opportunities during extended missions as well as entertainment and social connection opportunities. Context-sensitive augmented reality provides different support depending upon the on-board situation and ties directly to procedures, system data, daily plans, background information, and robotic assistants. TRACLabs has developed a procedure integrated development environment called PRIDE that is currently being used by NASA for ISS and Orion procedures. TRACLabs proposes to integrate augmented reality technologies into PRIDE in collaboration with the Georgia Tech Augmented Environmental Lab. In particular, Georgia Tech has developed an augmented realty capable web browser and Javascript framework that will complement the PRIDE web-based procedure execution system. These two industry-leading technologies will form the platform on which a suite of context-sensitive augmented reality applications can be quickly developed and deployed for a variety of NASA applications.