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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 271 records · Page 15
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS2004

Applications of Intelligent Tutoring Systems to Human-Robotic Exploration of Mars

Space missions with small crews extending over several years with time-delay preventing normal conversations with people on earth will raise many challenges for training. Of special interest are possible three-year missions to Mars, requiring refresher instruction and learning new skills based on unexpected problems with machines and environmental conditions. For example, the crew will be required to monitor and repair more complex life support systems for air and water recycling than we even know how to build today. Highly educated astronauts, often with several doctorate degrees, require a very different mode of interaction than we have developed for school children or even typical college students. Explanation methods may need to differ-using analogies and techniques from different domains-depending on whether the astronaut is an astrophysicist, a pilot, or a geologist.Virtual reality (e.g., for Hubble repair missions) and "integrated" simulations (involving role-playing and emphasizing failure scenarios) are the most common advanced forms of instruction used in space flight today. The emphasis is on collaborative, embodied interaction with the same workstations and tools used in practice (e.g., a cockpit simulator). Otherwise, computerized instructional technology used by NASA is not model-based or tutorial in nature. This discussion will review some of the key instructional methods used at NASA over the past two decades and consider why ITS methods have not been exploited. Some of the problems and opportunities for training for Mars missions are examined, including how using robots in exploration activities will help but raise new training problems. These ideas will be illustrated with examples from the BrahmsVE system in which a browser- based virtual reality display with avatars allows interacting with a distributed multiagent system, in which agents can be people, robots, or software programs. Using BrahmsVE may provide a way for astronauts to interact with proxies of people who serve as instructional coaches on Mars.

Clancey, William J.↗
NASA NTRS2002

Human Motion Tracking and Glove-Based User Interfaces for Virtual Environments in ANVIL

The Army/NASA Virtual Innovations Laboratory (ANVIL) at Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) provides an environment where engineers and other personnel can investigate novel applications of computer simulation and Virtual Reality (VR) technologies. Among the many hardware and software resources in ANVIL are several high-performance Silicon Graphics computer systems and a number of commercial software packages, such as Division MockUp by Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC) and Jack by Unigraphics Solutions, Inc. These hardware and software platforms are used in conjunction with various VR peripheral I/O (input / output) devices, CAD (computer aided design) models, etc. to support the objectives of the MSFC Engineering Systems Department/Systems Engineering Support Group (ED42) by studying engineering designs, chiefly from the standpoint of human factors and ergonomics. One of the more time-consuming tasks facing ANVIL personnel involves the testing and evaluation of peripheral I/O devices and the integration of new devices with existing hardware and software platforms. Another important challenge is the development of innovative user interfaces to allow efficient, intuitive interaction between simulation users and the virtual environments they are investigating. As part of his Summer Faculty Fellowship, the author was tasked with verifying the operation of some recently acquired peripheral interface devices and developing new, easy-to-use interfaces that could be used with existing VR hardware and software to better support ANVIL projects.

Joseph D. Dumas, II↗
DOE OSTI2026

Toward Fully Soft and Multifunctional Shape Sensing via Optical Waveguide Arrays

For soft bodies, surface deformation and pressure provide proprioceptive and exteroceptive information, including body configuration, body compliance, and external forces. We develop a sheet sensor with a fully soft sensing surface that provides surface shape reconstruction using optical waveguide arrays. The waveguides are fabricated to achieve a tunable linear response to bi‐directional bending curvature, and the waveguide arrays are configured to differentiate between ambiguous shapes. We characterize the waveguide performance, relating curvature sensitivity to the core's surface roughness. Synergy of waveguide responses reduces the number of sensing elements required and achieves damage resilience. Using waveguide sensitivity to pressure, we also demonstrate feasibility for exteroception. We demonstrate the multifunctional sensing capability by wrapping the sheet around an upper arm, showcasing joint motion and external force sensing. Integrated into or applied onto surfaces of robotic or living systems, this design can be implemented in applications such as virtual reality, teleoperation, physical therapy, and soft robotics.

Yu, Qifan [Department of Mechanical Engineering Ma↗
DOE OSTI2026

State of the art, gaps, and prospects in fusion materials theory and modelling

Advancing the theory and simulation of materials for fusion applications remains a key component of global roadmaps aimed at delivering much-needed fusion power. Especially as the drive for commercial application increases, prototypes must be designed against radiation damage before the relevant experimental data can be collected and cost reductions that are possible by testing materials in silico become even more important. Here, we summarise the state of the art as it emerged during the 7 th Fusion Materials Theory & Modelling Workshop that took place in 2024, with the aim to highlight present gaps and future directions for the fusion materials modelling community. Of particular interest were the effects of transmutations, chemical complexity with the development of novel alloys and interatomic potentials, advancements in modelling high-dose microstructures, comparison with experimental data and multiscale models for structural assessment relying on high-performance computing and virtual reality.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2025

Applications of visualization technology in the structural sciences

The structural sciences are undergoing a transformation driven by advancements in visualization technologies that aid researchers in understanding and communicating experimental data from complex molecular systems. New applications of integrative structural biological and biophysical approaches add a wide variety of complementary information from a broad range of scientific disciplines. These approaches extend structural biophysical methodologies to enable research by the incorporation of a variety of data streams and utilization of tools like molecular graphics, virtual reality, and machine learning. To redefine how structural data—particularly from cryo-electron microscopy and x-ray crystallography—are fed forward for scientific exploration and communication, the advances in tools for data visualization and interpretation have been critical. By bringing molecular systems into an interactive three-dimensional space, these novel technologies enhance research workflows, facilitate structure-based drug design, and create engaging educational experiences. Taken together, these visualization innovations are essential tools for advancing the field by making concepts more accessible and compelling.

Eng, Edward T. [New York Structural Biology Center↗
DOE OSTI2024

MetaPoL: Immersive VR based Indoor Patterns of Life (PoL) and Anomalies Data Generation for Insider Threat Modeling in Nuclear Security

Insider threats are perhaps the most serious challenges that nuclear and radiological security systems face. Insiders pose such a great threat due to their access, authority, and knowledge, granting them opportunities to bypass dedicated nuclear and radiological security elements. For example, in one of the latest major insider threat incidents to nuclear security, the Doel-4 nuclear powerplant in Belgium suffered a shutdown, the threat of nuclear materials diversion, and long-term loss of tens of millions of dollars. Seven years of investigation concluded that it was an inside job and attempted sabotage. In this regard, there is an immediate need for R&D and technology integration in the domain of modeling indoor Patterns-of-Life (PoL) and anomaly detection. This can be achieved by using datasets of facility users’ mobility and activity, which can support the design of algorithms for insider threat modeling and detection. However, due to classification, privacy, sensitivity, and safety protocols, such datasets from real physical nuclear reactor facilities are not only hard to share, but also not always feasible to deploy and collect. Aiming to find an alternate solution, our proposed demonstration work - MetaPoL, is the first-ever (for the application space) immersive VR (virtual reality) environment of a real-world secure facility and allows users to move-and-stay through the designed indoor physical layout and also encounter NPCs (non-player characters) that emulate other facility users. In the MetaPoL an interactive user performs realistic spatio-temporal movement, dwelling and activities using a Meta Quest Pro VR headset, and that generates high-frequency (in time) high-resolution (in space) indoor spatial-temporal datasets that are valuable for PoL modeling and anomaly detection research specifically for insider threat modeling and detection mission. Such generated realistic, rich in context, and mission specific datasets can boost AI/Machine Learning based research for modeling and detecting insider threats in nuclear security and nonproliferation.

Gunaratne, Chathika↗
DOE OSTI2025

GRUMDN: A Multi-Task Model for Predicting Human Patterns-of-Life from Stay Transition Data

Understanding human patterns-of-life (PoL) is essential towards ensuring safe and secure indoor facility environment as well as outdoor urban environment. Prediction of human movement in between places of interest is vital in understanding human PoL. Movement between spaces maybe represented and detected in one of the two forms: 1) trajectories: locations measured at regular time intervals by mobile sensors, bluetooth or GPS sensors; or 2) stay transitions: semantic PoI (points of interest) and stay duration data measurable by eventbased sensors that collect data when a check-in or check-out event is detected. Stay transition data provides a more compressed data format compared to trajectories data, especially in situations with longer stay durations, while preserving the information necessary for PoL analysis. Now as introduced briefly in the paper, our deployed end application (Digital Twin of a facility with non-player characters, besides the interactive user in virtual reality) needed a well-performing and validated AI/ML model for simulating high quality stay transitions behavior. In this study we thus primarily present our findings with developing and validating that model, which is a multi-task neural network for stay transition prediction. The neural network consists of two heads, for corresponding two tasks of stay category prediction and stay duration prediction. We evaluated gated recurrent units and multi-layer perceptrons of varying network sizes for stay category prediction; while mixture density networks, noisy generator-only networks, and generative adversarial networks of varying network sizes for stay duration prediction. We have then evaluated four multi-task models, constructed by combining these specialized models, on their ability to predict stay transition data. We tested our models on datasets from two different cases: 1) a simulation-generated dataset of indoor movement within the HFIR (high flux isotope reactor) nuclear reactor facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL); and 2) the GeoLife human mobility dataset of outdoor urban movement available in literature. Our results indicate that GRUMDN, which combines gated recurrent units (GRU) for stay category prediction task, and mixture density networks (MDN) for stay duration prediction task, did overall outperform other multitask models and the current state-of-the-art.

Gunaratne, Chathika [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000225088745↗
DOE OSTI2024

Electronic Visualization Laboratory's 50th Anniversary Retrospective: Look to the Future, Build on the Past

September 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). EVL's introduction of the CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment in 1992, the first widely replicated, projection-based, walk-in, virtual-reality (VR) system in the world, put EVL at the forefront of collaborative, immersive data exploration and analytics. However, the journey did not begin then. Since its founding in 1973, EVL has been developing tools and techniques for real-time, interactive visualizations—pillars of VR. But EVL's culture is also relevant to its successes, as it has always been an interdisciplinary lab that fosters teamwork, where each person's expertise contributes to the development of the necessary tools, hardware, system software, applications, and human interface models to solve problems. Over the years, as multidisciplinary collaborations evolved and advanced scientific instruments and data resources were distributed globally, the need to access and share data and visualizations while working with colleagues, local and remote, synchronous and asynchronous, also became important fields of study. This paper is a retrospective of EVL's past 50 years that surveys the many networked, immersive, collaborative visualization and VR systems and applications it developed and deployed, as well as lessons learned and future plans.

Johnson, Andrew E.↗
DOE OSTI2024

US-UK fusion energy collaborations in the digital space

The US and UK share the vision for fusion as a vital part of the clean energy future. This vision is reflected in the respective national plans in the form of the Bold Decadal Vision for Commercial Fusion (BDV) in the US and the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP) program in the UK. Digital tools such as simulation and control frameworks, design tools, AI/ML, high performance computing (HPC), and virtual reality (VR) will play an important role in developing, diagnosing, operating, and further improving burning-plasma-class fusion power plants. Therefore, a collaborative approach, involving both the public and private sectors, to developing these digital tools can accelerate the path to fusion energy commercialization. In this report we discuss previous and ongoing collaborations and opportunities to expand these collaborations into new areas. We conclude this report with near term actions and a vision of the collaboration to the Joint Coordinating Committee.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2025

R.U.N. Motion VR Boots: Realistic Unimpeded Natural (RUN) Motion Boots for VR gaming in the comfort of your home

Virtual reality (VR) gaming has experienced increasingly widespread adoption in recent years largely due to the development of affordable, consumer-grade headsets equipped with high quality, miniature displays and compact sensors for motion tracking. These devices are now able to provide users with immersive experiences that far surpass what traditional video games can achieve. However, despite these technological strides, a fundamental limitation remains: VR users are unable to move freely in their physical environment without the risk of colliding with real-world obstacles and hazards. This safety concern significantly restricts the level of immersion and natural movement possible in VR gaming.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2026

CRCNS21 Computational Models of Multisensory Integration by Upper Limb in Humanoids and Amputees

This international collaborative research project between Johns Hopkins University (JHU) and the Technical University of Munich (TUM) investigated how the human brain processes and integrates multiple types of sensory information, such as touch and force, with the goal of improving prosthetic limbs for amputees and advancing sensory capabilities in humanoid robots. The research advanced our understanding of how the brain responds to sensory feedback in upper-limb amputees. Through experiments in which amputees received electrical stimulation while performing phantom hand movements, we demonstrated that sensory feedback activates the cortical sensorimotor and multisensory regions, and that these regions communicate dynamically during stimulation. Experiments with intact-limb participants explored the integration of visual, haptic, and force feedback, as well as in virtual reality motor training, further showing how the brain processes multimodal sensory information. In addition, this research inspired work on examining the reliability of where amputees perceive sensations over time, which contributed to a successful doctoral fellowship for continued investigation. Our collaborators at TUM improved multimodal sensor technology combining tactile and thermal feedback for humanoid robots, demonstrating the feasibility of integrating multiple sensor types into a unified system for detecting and responding to environmental stimuli. The experimental methods and analysis techniques developed across both teams, including functional network analysis and multimodal sensor integration, provide a foundation for future research in prosthetics and robotics. This research benefits the public by generating knowledge about how amputees process restored sensory information. Advances in humanoid sensing contribute to safer human-robot interaction. The project also fostered international collaboration and cross-disciplinary training: one TUM doctoral student spent a summer at JHU working on multimodal sensor integration, while two JHU students traveled to TUM to host workshops on neuromorphic sensory encoding and sensory integration.

42 ENGINEERING↗
NASA NTRS1991

The virtual environment display system

Virtual environment technology is a display and control technology that can surround a person in an interactive computer generated or computer mediated virtual environment. It has evolved at NASA-Ames since 1984 to serve NASA's missions and goals. The exciting potential of this technology, sometimes called Virtual Reality, Artificial Reality, or Cyberspace, has been recognized recently by the popular media, industry, academia, and government organizations. Much research and development will be necessary to bring it to fruition.

Mcgreevy, Michael W.↗
NASA NTRS1991

Quo vadimus? The 21st Century and multimedia

The concept is related of computer driven multimedia to the NASA Scientific and Technical Information Program (STIP). Multimedia is defined here as computer integration and output of text, animation, audio, video, and graphics. Multimedia is the stage of computer based information that allows access to experience. The concepts are also drawn in of hypermedia, intermedia, interactive multimedia, hypertext, imaging, cyberspace, and virtual reality. Examples of these technology developments are given for NASA, private industry, and academia. Examples of concurrent technology developments and implementations are given to show how these technologies, along with multimedia, have put us at the threshold of the 21st century. The STI Program sees multimedia as an opportunity for revolutionizing the way STI is managed.

Kuhn, Allan D.↗
NASA NTRS1991

Human factors issues for interstellar spacecraft

Developments in research on space human factors are reviewed in the context of a self-sustaining interstellar spacecraft based on the notion of traveling space settlements. Assumptions about interstellar travel are set forth addressing costs, mission durations, and the need for multigenerational space colonies. The model of human motivation by Maslow (1970) is examined and directly related to the design of space habitat architecture. Human-factors technology issues encompass the human-machine interface, crew selection and training, and the development of spaceship infrastructure during transtellar flight. A scenario for feasible instellar travel is based on a speed of 0.5c, a timeframe of about 100 yr, and an expandable multigenerational crew of about 100 members. Crew training is identified as a critical human-factors issue requiring the development of perceptual and cognitive aids such as expert systems and virtual reality.

Cohen, Marc M.↗
NASA NTRS1990

NASA/NSF Workshop on Antarctic Research

Viewgraphs that accompanied an Ames Research Center presentation address Ames' currently-supported life sciences activities. These include crew factor issues such as human, automation, and telecommunication systems; strategic behavior and workloads; sleep, fatigue, and circadian rhythms; and virtual reality and spatial instrumentation. The need, background, and examples of pertinent research are provided.

Connors, Mary M.↗
NASA NTRS1992

Developments of new force reflecting control schemes and an application to a teleoperation training simulator

Two schemes of force reflecting control, position-error based force reflection and low-pass-filtered force reflection, both combined with shared compliance control, were developed for dissimilar master-slave arms. These schemes enabled high force reflection gains, which were not possible with a conventional scheme when the slave arm was much stiffer than the master arm. The experimental results with a peg-in-hole task indicated that the newly force reflecting control schemes combined with compliance control resulted in best task performances. As a related application, a simulated force reflection/shared compliance control teleoperation trainer was developed that provided the operator with the feel of kinesthetic force virtual reality.

Kim, Won S.↗
NASA NTRS1992

Advanced construction management for lunar base construction - Surface operations planner

The study proposes a conceptual solution and lays the framework for developing a new, sophisticated and intelligent tool for a lunar base construction crew to use. This concept integrates expert systems for critical decision making, virtual reality for training, logistics and laydown optimization, automated productivity measurements, and an advanced scheduling tool to form a unique new planning tool. The concept features extensive use of computers and expert systems software to support the actual work, while allowing the crew to control the project from the lunar surface. Consideration is given to a logistics data base, laydown area management, flexible critical progress scheduler, video simulation of assembly tasks, and assembly information and tracking documentation.

Kehoe, Robert P.↗
NASA NTRS1990

AI applications to conceptual aircraft design

This paper presents in viewgraph form several applications of artificial intelligence (AI) to the conceptual design of aircraft, including: an access manager for automated data management, AI techniques applied to optimization, and virtual reality for scientific visualization of the design prototype.

Kathryn M. Chalfan↗