Power Source Global Summit: Vision to Reality Interactive Demo
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3D Stereo Immersive Environment Utilizing Mobile Devices / Peripherals
This project expands upon some of the FY23 IRAD funded "Full Lunar Surface Simulation Platform" (FLS-SP) derived technologies. The results have demonstrated a low-cost, compact, immersive technology that supports training, interaction, mission planning, and other man-in-loop activities in simulated environments called “3D Stereo Immersion Environment Utilizing Mobile Devices” (3D SIEUMD). These activities will become crucial for safety and mission, planning, and assurance in the Artemis program, as well as future commercial crew programs. The FLS-SP enabled the visualization of simulated lunar surface operations for rovers, landers, habitation, and EVA. The 3D SIEUMD technology allows for NASA S&MA experts, tasked with defining safety protocols and procedures, to interact in an immersive environment without expensive immersion gear. Reduction of the overall safety risk by immersing safety concepts into the design and engineering phase for very small cost is accomplished even before hardware is deployed to the lunar surface.
Scott Johnson↗
NASA KSC Intern Final Report - Virtual Reality in STEM Engagement
For this internship, I was a part of the multi-center NextGen STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) pilot. Specifically, I worked with the Developing Commercial Crew Program (CCP) Capabilities team that focuses on human spaceflight to the space station with NASA’s commercial partners. Composed of NASA employees and contractors (who are connected to KSC, JSC, and LaRC), they work to ensure that students will experience traditional classroom content and be immersed in emerging technologies in order to explore Commercial Crew missions and launch facilities. This group is in the process of creating educational products and resources to inspire the next generation to pursue STEM and to allow educators to have access to unique and enticing STEM activities. These products include: age-appropriate classroom lessons (including activity sheets and challenges) for kindergarten through twelfth grade; a CCP app and corresponding guide; learning experiences for students as well as educators; and virtual field trips and tours using NASA-created Virtual Reality (VR) videos and a custom VR app. My particular assignment was managing the VR equipment, developing an understanding of how to maximize the use of the equipment, creating documents that explain and convey the operations and procedures concerning the equipment (including lessons learned from equipment use), and training others to utilize the equipment effectively and correctly for conference events and group demonstrations. Over the course of this internship, I helped my team outline and learn essential procedures of operation for the VR equipment, solved technology problems that arose (due to the nature of creating unique products), and encouraged audiences at KSC and various conferences to consider using the CCP VR videos in their classrooms as an opportunity to engage and challenge the next generation to pursue STEM careers.
STEM↗
Human Centered Hardware Modeling and Collaboration
In order to collaborate engineering designs among NASA Centers and customers, to in clude hardware and human activities from multiple remote locations, live human-centered modeling and collaboration across several sites has been successfully facilitated by Kennedy Space Center. The focus of this paper includes innovative a pproaches to engineering design analyses and training, along with research being conducted to apply new technologies for tracking, immersing, and evaluating humans as well as rocket, vehic le, component, or faci lity hardware utilizing high resolution cameras, motion tracking, ergonomic analysis, biomedical monitoring, wor k instruction integration, head-mounted displays, and other innovative human-system integration modeling, simulation, and collaboration applications.
Stambolian Damon↗
Prospective Safety Analysis and the Complex Aviation System
Fatal accident rates in commercial passenger aviation are at historic lows yet have plateaued and are not showing evidence of further safety advances. Modern aircraft accidents reflect both historic causal factors and new unexpected "Black Swan" events. The ever-increasing complexity of the aviation system, along with its associated technology and organizational relationships, provides fertile ground for fresh problems. It is important to take a proactive approach to aviation safety by working to identify novel causation mechanisms for future aviation accidents before they happen. Progress has been made in using of historic data to identify the telltale signals preceding aviation accidents and incidents, using the large repositories of discrete and continuous data on aircraft and air traffic control performance and information reported by front-line personnel. Nevertheless, the aviation community is increasingly embracing predictive approaches to aviation safety. The "prospective workshop" early assessment tool described in this paper represents an approach toward this prospective mindset-one that attempts to identify the future vectors of aviation and asks the question: "What haven't we considered in our current safety assessments?" New causation mechanisms threatening aviation safety will arise in the future because new (or revised) systems and procedures will have to be used under future contextual conditions that have not been properly anticipated. Many simulation models exist for demonstrating the safety cases of new operational concepts and technologies. However the results from such models can only be as valid as the accuracy and completeness of assumptions made about the future context in which the new operational concepts and/or technologies will be immersed. Of course that future has not happened yet. What is needed is a reasonably high-confidence description of the future operational context, capturing critical contextual characteristics that modulate both the likelihood of occurrence of hazards, and the likelihood that those hazards will lead to negative safety events. Heuristics extracted from scenarios, questionnaires, and observed trends from scanning the aviation horizon may be helpful in capturing those future changes in a way conducive to safety assessment. What is also needed is a checklist of potential sources of emerging risk that arise from organizational features that are frequently overlooked. The ultimate goal is to develop a pragmatic, workable method for using descriptions of the future aviation context, to generate valid predictions of safety risks.
prospection↗
NASA Space Environment Analog for Training, Engineering, Science, and Technology (SEATEST) 6 Detailed Final Report
After more than 50 years since the last crewed lunar landing, plans for more missions to the moon are in development. For these missions, efficient and sustainable logistics will be critical. Additionally, innovative methods of cargo transfer to and from a lunar outpost should be considered for successfully establishing a permanent presence on the moon. SEATEST (Space Environment Analog for Training, Engineering, Science, and Technology) is an immersive mission-analogous operational atmosphere where buoyancy effects and supplemental weights can simulate partial gravity conditions similar to those astronauts will experience on the moon. SEATEST 6 took place at the University of Southern California (USC) Wrigley Marine Science Center on Santa Catalina Island from July 18-30, 2023. The analog was used to collect preliminary logistics data on two different offloading conceptual methods (a davit and a zipline) during a simulated lunar mission. Pre-test analysis indicated for a crew of two on a 14-day mission, approximately three Medium Pressurized Logistics Containers (MPLC) sized logistics containers (or a total of 37.5 single Cargo Transfer Bag Equivalents (CTBE)) would be needed to support a mission. A Computer-Aided Design (CAD) analysis was employed on the SEATEST airlock mockup to determine how many logistic containers would fit with two suited crewmembers, don/doff stands, and hatch operations. It was determined that for SEATEST, a total of 15 1.0 Small Pressurized Logistics Containers (SPLCs) and 8 2.0 SPLCs would adequately fit into the approximate 9.5 cubic meter airlock volume. This does not fully represent a complete 14-day logistic supply; however, it does provide a preliminary estimate to initiate design conversations between logistics teams and crew at this early stage of development. Data were collected in eight logistics transfer scenarios over two days with four scenarios per day. Five test subject crew participated in scenarios as pairs. Scenarios included two sizes of logistics containers – 1.0 SPLC (equivalent to a single Cargo Transfer Bag (CTB) and 2.0 SPLC (equivalent to two CTBs). Planed evaluations included the use of a logistics port compared to transfer through an Airlock hatch, offloading methods based on either a davit or a zipline system, choreography of cargo in the airlock to permit ingress and suit doffing, and dust removal protocols for an understanding of the overall impact to transfer ops. Data collected included objective data (task times for conducting overall tasks and subtasks, full audio/video of test activities, and inadvertent “dings” on hardware) and subjective data (crew consensus of: task acceptability and capability assessment ratings related to best practices, considerations, and constraints for EVA-driven logistics transfer ConOps, sim quality of the test environment, and more general debrief comments). The two logistic offloading transfer concepts (davit, zipline) presented both advantages and limitations. The davit’s flexibility in allowing the crew to pick up the containers without physical interaction was well regarded by the crew. Some limitations of select davit hardware components were noted, but the overall concept was acceptable. The zipline system proved to be the most efficient way of moving logistics from the lander to the airlock and eliminated the need for dust operations. However, extended and repetitive lifting of containers to the line could be fatiguing. In conclusion, logistics transfer could hypothetically be achieved without an offloading method; however, the time requirement for such operations would be prohibitive. Results of crew subjective feedback proposed a combined or hybrid davit/zipline method to increase efficiency.
Logistics↗
Using CLIPS to represent knowledge in a VR simulation
Virtual reality (VR) is an exciting use of advanced hardware and software technologies to achieve an immersive simulation. Until recently, the majority of virtual environments were merely 'fly-throughs' in which a user could freely explore a 3-dimensional world or a visualized dataset. Now that the underlying technologies are reaching a level of maturity, programmers are seeking ways to increase the complexity and interactivity of immersive simulations. In most cases, interactivity in a virtual environment can be specified in the form 'whenever such-and-such happens to object X, it reacts in the following manner.' CLIPS and COOL provide a simple and elegant framework for representing this knowledge-base in an efficient manner that can be extended incrementally. The complexity of a detailed simulation becomes more manageable when the control flow is governed by CLIPS' rule-based inference engine as opposed to by traditional procedural mechanisms. Examples in this paper will illustrate an effective way to represent VR information in CLIPS, and to tie this knowledge base to the input and output C routines of a typical virtual environment.
Engelberg, Mark L.↗
Research on Intelligent Synthesis Environments
Four research activities related to Intelligent Synthesis Environment (ISE) have been performed under this grant. The four activities are: 1) non-deterministic approaches that incorporate technologies such as intelligent software agents, visual simulations and other ISE technologies; 2) virtual labs that leverage modeling, simulation and information technologies to create an immersive, highly interactive virtual environment tailored to the needs of researchers and learners; 3) advanced learning modules that incorporate advanced instructional, user interface and intelligent agent technologies; and 4) assessment and continuous improvement of engineering team effectiveness in distributed collaborative environments.
Noor, Ahmed K.↗
Using Immersive Virtual Environments for Certification
Immersive virtual environments (VEs) technology has matured to the point where it can be utilized as a scientific and engineering problem solving tool. In particular, VEs are starting to be used to design and evaluate safety-critical systems that involve human operators, such as flight and driving simulators, complex machinery training, and emergency rescue strategies.
virtual reality software certification human-compu↗
Heliophysics: The Solar and Space Physics of a New Era. Recommended Roadmap for Science and Technology 2009-2030
Our planet is immersed in a seemingly invisible yet exotic and inherently dangerous environment. Above the protective cocoon of Earth's lower atmosphere is a plasma soup composed of electrified and magnetized matter entwined with penetrating radiation and energetic particles. The Earth's magnetic field interacts with the Sun's outer atmosphere to create this extraordinary environment.
Heliophysics↗
The Emergence of Agent-Based Technology as an Architectural Component of Serious Games
The evolution of games as an alternative to traditional simulations in the military context has been gathering momentum over the past five years, even though the exploration of their use in the serious sense has been ongoing since the mid-nineties. Much of the focus has been on the aesthetics of the visuals provided by the core game engine as well as the artistry provided by talented development teams to produce not only breathtaking artwork, but highly immersive game play. Consideration of game technology is now so much a part of the modeling and simulation landscape that it is becoming difficult to distinguish traditional simulation solutions from game-based approaches. But games have yet to provide the much needed interactive free play that has been the domain of semi-autonomous forces (SAF). The component-based middleware architecture that game engines provide promises a great deal in terms of options for the integration of agent solutions to support the development of non-player characters that engage the human player without the deterministic nature of scripted behaviors. However, there are a number of hard-learned lessons on the modeling and simulation side of the equation that game developers have yet to learn, such as: correlation of heterogeneous systems, scalability of both terrain and numbers of non-player entities, and the bi-directional nature of simulation to game interaction provided by Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) and High Level Architecture (HLA).
Phillips, Mark↗
NASA Virtual Glovebox (VBX): Emerging Simulation Technology for Space Station Experiment Design, Development, Training and Troubleshooting
The International Space Station demonstrates the greatest capabilities of human ingenuity, international cooperation and technology development. The complexity of this space structure is unprecedented; and training astronaut crews to maintain all its systems, as well as perform a multitude of research experiments, requires the most advanced training tools and techniques. Computer simulation and virtual environments are currently used by astronauts to train for robotic arm manipulations and extravehicular activities; but now, with the latest computer technologies and recent successes in areas of medical simulation, the capability exists to train astronauts for more hands-on research tasks using immersive virtual environments. We have developed a new technology, the Virtual Glovebox (VGX), for simulation of experimental tasks that astronauts will perform aboard the Space Station. The VGX may also be used by crew support teams for design of experiments, testing equipment integration capability and optimizing the procedures astronauts will use. This is done through the 3D, desk-top sized, reach-in virtual environment that can simulate the microgravity environment in space. Additional features of the VGX allow for networking multiple users over the internet and operation of tele-robotic devices through an intuitive user interface. Although the system was developed for astronaut training and assisting support crews, Earth-bound applications, many emphasizing homeland security, have also been identified. Examples include training experts to handle hazardous biological and/or chemical agents in a safe simulation, operation of tele-robotic systems for assessing and diffusing threats such as bombs, and providing remote medical assistance to field personnel through a collaborative virtual environment. Thus, the emerging VGX simulation technology, while developed for space- based applications, can serve a dual use facilitating homeland security here on Earth.
Smith, Jeffrey D.↗
Implementing Artificial Intelligence Behaviors in a Virtual World
In this paper, we will present a look at the current state of the art in human-computer interface technologies, including intelligent interactive agents, natural speech interaction and gestural based interfaces. We describe our use of these technologies to implement a cost effective, immersive experience on a public region in Second Life. We provision our Artificial Agents as a German Shepherd Dog avatar with an external rules engine controlling the behavior and movement. To interact with the avatar, we implemented a natural language and gesture system allowing the human avatars to use speech and physical gestures rather than interacting via a keyboard and mouse. The result is a system that allows multiple humans to interact naturally with AI avatars by playing games such as fetch with a flying disk and even practicing obedience exercises using voice and gesture, a natural seeming day in the park.
Krisler, Brian↗
Terrain Modelling for Immersive Visualization for the Mars Exploration Rovers
Immersive environments are being used to support mission operations at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This technology contributed to the Mars Pathfinder Mission in planning sorties for the Sojourner rover and is being used for the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) missions. The stereo imagery captured by the rovers is used to create 3D terrain models, which can be viewed from any angle, to provide a powerful and information rich immersive visualization experience. These technologies contributed heavily to both the mission success and the phenomenal level of public outreach achieved by Mars Pathfinder and MER. This paper will review the utilization of terrain modelling for immersive environments in support of MER.
immersive environments↗
Development and Characterization of the Bonding and Integration Technologies Needed for Fabricating Silicon Carbide Based Injector Components
Advanced ceramic bonding and integration technologies play a critical role in the fabrication and application of silicon carbide based components for a number of aerospace and ground based applications. One such application is a lean direct injector for a turbine engine to achieve low NOx emissions. Ceramic to ceramic diffusion bonding and ceramic to metal brazing technologies are being developed for this injector application. For the diffusion bonding technology, titanium interlayers (coatings and foils) were used to aid in the joining of silicon carbide (SiC) substrates. The influence of such variables as surface finish, interlayer thickness, and processing time were investigated. Electron microprobe analysis was used to identify the reaction formed phases. In the diffusion bonds, an intermediate phase, Ti5Si3Cx, formed that is thermally incompatible in its thermal expansion and caused thermal stresses and cracking during the processing cool-down. Thinner interlayers of pure titanium and/or longer processing times resulted in an optimized microstructure. Tensile tests on the joined materials resulted in strengths of 13-28 MPa depending on the SiC substrate material. Nondestructive evaluation using ultrasonic immersion showed well formed bonds. For the joining technology of brazing Kovar fuel tubes to silicon carbide, preliminary development of the joining approach has begun. Various technical issues and requirements for the injector application are addressed.
Halbig,Michael C.↗
Bonding and Integration Technologies for Silicon Carbide Based Injector Components
Advanced ceramic bonding and integration technologies play a critical role in the fabrication and application of silicon carbide based components for a number of aerospace and ground based applications. One such application is a lean direct injector for a turbine engine to achieve low NOx emissions. Ceramic to ceramic diffusion bonding and ceramic to metal brazing technologies are being developed for this injector application. For the diffusion bonding, titanium interlayers (PVD and foils) were used to aid in the joining of silicon carbide (SiC) substrates. The influence of such variables as surface finish, interlayer thickness (10, 20, and 50 microns), processing time and temperature, and cooling rates were investigated. Microprobe analysis was used to identify the phases in the bonded region. For bonds that were not fully reacted an intermediate phase, Ti5Si3Cx, formed that is thermally incompatible in its thermal expansion and caused thermal stresses and cracking during the processing cool-down. Thinner titanium interlayers and/or longer processing times resulted in stable and compatible phases that did not contribute to microcracking and resulted in an optimized microstructure. Tensile tests on the joined materials resulted in strengths of 13-28 MPa depending on the SiC substrate material. Non-destructive evaluation using ultrasonic immersion showed well formed bonds. For the joining technology of brazing Kovar fuel tubes to silicon carbide, preliminary development of the joining approach has begun. Various technical issues and requirements for the injector application are addressed.
Halbig, Michael C.↗
Technology Development in Support of Hyperspectral Infrared Atmospheric Sounding in a CubeSat
Hyperspectral infrared sounding in a CubeSat will provide a new dimension to the current suite of IR sounders by allowing measurements at multiple times of day and enabling formation flying of IR sounders for new data products such as Atmospheric Motion Vector (AMV) winds. This paper focuses on technology development during the CubeSat Infrared Atmospheric Sounder (CIRAS) project sponsored by the NASA Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO), and coincident studies by the NOAA Office of Projects, Planning, and Analysis (OPPA). The CIRAS approach incorporates key new instrument technologies developed at JPL’s Microdevices Lab (MDL) including a 2D array of High Operating Temperature Barrier Infrared Detector (HOT-BIRD) material, selected for its high uniformity, low cost, low noise and higher operating temperatures than traditional materials. The second key technology is an MWIR Grating Spectrometer (MGS) designed by Ball Aerospace with a JPL MDL slit and immersion grating to provide hyperspectral infrared imaging in a CubeSat volume. The third key technology is a blackbody calibration target fabricated with MDL’s black silicon to have very high emissivity in a flat plate construction. JPL has completed design and breadboard of the mechanical, electronic and thermal subsystems for CIRAS payload including a HOT-BIRD FPA, with filters in a dewar and a breadboard of the electronics and scan mirror assembly. Blue Canyon Technologies, developer of the CIRAS 6U CubeSat, completed the Final Design Review for the spacecraft.
Yee, Karl↗
NASA's Hybrid Reality Lab: One Giant Leap for Full Dive
This presentation demonstrates how NASA is using consumer VR headsets, game engine technology and NVIDIA's GPUs to create highly immersive future training systems augmented with extremely realistic haptic feedback, sound, additional sensory information, and how these can be used to improve the engineering workflow. Include in this presentation is an environment simulation of the ISS, where users can interact with virtual objects, handrails, and tracked physical objects while inside VR, integration of consumer VR headsets with the Active Response Gravity Offload System, and a space habitat architectural evaluation tool. Attendees will learn how the best elements of real and virtual worlds can be combined into a hybrid reality environment with tangible engineering and scientific applications.
Delgado, Francisco J.↗