An intelligent space robot for crew help and crew and equipment retrieval

This paper describes the development status of a prototype supervised intelligent robot for space application for purposes of (1) helping the crew of a spacecraft such as the Space Station with various tasks such as holding objects and retrieving/replacing tools and other objects from/into storage, and for purposes of (2) retrieving detached objects, such as equipment or crew, that have become separated from their spacecraft. In addition to this set of tasks in this low Earth orbiting spacecraft environment, it is argued that certain aspects of the technology can be viewed as generic in approach, thereby offering insight into intelligent robots for other tasks and environments.Some candidate requirements for the space applications are presented which will be refined by the results of the prototype development and evaluation testing. Our development approach is described, including space simulation environments used in developmental testing. Candidate software architectures and their key technical issues which enable real work in real environments to be accomplished safely and robustly are addressed.Results of computer simulations of retrieving detached objects, including the situated reasoning/reaction plan approach used, are presented, as well as the results of an air bearing floor simulation of retrieving detached objects.Also described are characterization results on the usable reduced gravity environment in an aircraft flying parabolas (to simulate weightlessness) and results on hardware performance there. These results show it is feasible to use that environment for evaluative testing of dexterous grasping based on real-time vision of freely rotating and translating objects.     

Optimization-based decision support system for crew scheduling in the cruise industry

Crew members on cruise ships are hired in a global labor market, and a major cost for cruise lines is moving crew members from their home cities to the cruise ship’s departure port. Complicating the crew scheduling problem is the uncertainty due to no-shows, terminations, and other reasons for crew to terminate their contract prematurely. To address this problem, this paper describes a scheduling system that implements a two-stage planning process that first determines overbooking levels for the number of crew to offer contracts to, and then second, a goal integer programming formulation to minimize the movement cost of assigning crew to ships while maintaining adequate crew levels and a desired crew region composition. We solve actual-sized problems characteristic of the cruise industry in a reasonably short amount of time. Experiments comparing the actual crew movement costs to the system’s projected crew movement costs show that the scheduling system can consistently reduce the movement costs in the range of 9–23%, better maintain desired crew levels, and better maintain desired crew region composition.     

An integrated logistics support system for training crew medical officers in advanced cardiac life support management.

The purpose of this paper is to present an approach for the development of an integrated logistics support system for training space flight crew medical officers in advanced cardiac life support (ACLS). The most practical approach to deal with this problem has been determined to be the training of one or more of the crew members on the mission as crew medical officers (CMO's). If this approach is taken, there are a number of problems that must be addressed. The basic approach presented in this paper is to develop a performance quality index for ACLS tasks and use this index to monitor and control the performance of crew members throughout their tenure as CMO's. The control tool of the system is based on an integrated learning and forgetting model used to forecast CMO performance level at a given point during flight training. The model represents an aid for trainers in determining a training regime and maintaining the performance standards. A performance evaluator and trainer is also developed to help in the establishment of trainee performance level during training or retraining. All of these tools were evaluated using either expert opinion questionnaires or experimental results. In conclusion, the results presented provide the tools required for an integrated logistics support system for training ACLS personnel.     

Awareness support for asynchronous engineering collaboration

This study addresses collaboration awareness for asynchronous distributed engineering collaboration with computer‐aided design (CAD) browsers. An analysis of the characteristics of asynchronous collaboration identified the information that needs to be presented. Two features for a CAD browser system, team member information enhancement and task information enhancement, were designed to improve collaborator and task awareness. An experiment was conducted to test the effectiveness of the new proposed features. The results of the experiment indicated the following. First, the enhancement of team member information and task information improved collaboration efficiency by 8.1 and 20.2%, respectively. Second, for asynchronous collaboration, the availability and workload of team members need to be presented rather than capturing and presenting dynamic information about team members. Third, the information about the status of each task, such as the progress, time passed, and dependability, needs to be enhanced for efficient collaboration. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Hum Factors Man 13: 97–113, 2003.     

Investigating ontology development for engineering design support

Ontologies are now in widespread use as a means of formalizing domain knowledge in a way that makes it accessible, shareable and reusable. Nevertheless, to many, the nature and use of ontologies are unfamiliar. This paper takes a practical approach - through the use of example - to clarifying what ontologies are and how they might be useful in an important and representative phase of the engineering design process, that of design requirement development and capture.The paper consists of two parts. In the first part ontologies and their use are discussed, and a methodology for developing ontologies is explored. In the second part, three very different types of ontology are developed in accordance with the methodology. Each of the ontologies captures a different conceptual facet of the engineering design domain, described at a quite different level of abstraction than the others. The process of developing ontologies is illustrated in a practical way and the application of these ontologies for supporting the capture of the engineering design requirement is described as a means of demonstrating the general potential of ontologies.     

Qualitative design support for engineering and architecture

Conventional design support software tools cannot effectively manage the complex, heterogeneous information used in engineering and architecture (EA) tasks. Crucially, despite uncertainty being an inherent quality of EA information particularly in the early stages of a design project, current tools solely rely on numerical approaches which do not support such incomplete and vague information. In this paper, we establish a complete framework for developing qualitative support tools that directly address these shortcomings. Our framework is application oriented and addresses the broader issues surrounding the actual use of qualitative methods. It provides design principles and strategies that allow a software engineer to develop custom qualitative software tools according to their specific EA task specifications. Our framework also provides the engineer with practical theory and guidelines for implementing their custom qualitative model and validating their system using context specific test data. We demonstrate the validity of our framework by presenting a case study in architectural lighting in which a prototype qualitative reasoning engine successfully automates qualitative logic about the subjective impressions of a lighting installation.     

Relevance versus generalization in cognitive engineering

The purpose of this article is to describe how research at the intersection of cognition, technology, and work can be generalized beyond the source context of scientific inquiry and confirmation. Special emphasis is given to resolve confusion about the use of terms such as “ecological validity” and the “real world.” The ultimate goal is to foster a more productive dialog on the merits of where and how research on important cognitive engineering topics, such as cognitive adaptation to change and uncertainty, should be conducted.     

Contextual fuzzy cognitive map for decision support in geographicinformation systems

Fuzzy cognitive maps or FCMs have been shown to be useful when representing qualitative data. We have shown that these FCM structures can be used to represent quantitative and qualitative data. We illustrate this structure applied to geographic information system (GIS) applications. We illustrate the types of CFCMs we can generate using real census data, human expert knowledge, and quantitative data in the form of maps in a GIS. The goal of this system is to use objects (topographical and conceptual) and their relationships, either supplied by census data or generated by the GIS and to map them as layers in the GIS. Using fuzzy membership functions from experiments with GIS users, we can construct CFCMs for decision support. This will also have significant applications in intelligent servants that are able to assist and interact with the human user     

Intelligent control of life support for space missions

Future manned space operations will include a greater use of automation than we currently see. For example, semiautonomous robots and software agents will perform difficult tasks while operating unattended most of the time. As these automated agents become more prevalent, human contact with them will occur more often and become more routine, so designing these automated agents according to the principles of human-centered computing is important. We describe two cases of semiautonomous control software developed and fielded in test environments at the NASA Johnson Space Center. This software operated continuously at the JSC and interacted closely with humans for months at a time.     

A decision support system for product design in concurrent engineering

Compared with the traditional sequential design method, concurrent engineering is a systematic approach to integrate concurrent design of products and their related processes. One of the key factors to successfully implement concurrent engineering is information technology. In order to design a product and its manufacturing process simultaneously, information on product features, manufacturing requirements, and customer demands must be processed while the design is concurrently going on. There is an increased understanding of the importance of the correct decisions being made at the conceptual design and development stages that involve many complex evaluation and decision-making tasks. In order to promote the efficiency in concurrent product development, appropriate evaluation and decision tools need to be provided. In this paper, the characteristics of fuzzy, multi-stage evaluation and decision making in concurrent product development process are analyzed and a decision support system for product design in concurrent engineering is presented. An example is given to illustrate the application of the system.     

Hidden space support vector machines

Hidden space support vector machines (HSSVMs) are presented in this paper. The input patterns are mapped into a high-dimensional hidden space by a set of hidden nonlinear functions and then the structural risk is introduced into the hidden space to construct HSSVMs. Moreover, the conditions for the nonlinear kernel function in HSSVMs are more relaxed, and even differentiability is not required. Compared with support vector machines (SVMs), HSSVMs can adopt more kinds of kernel functions because the positive definite property of the kernel function is not a necessary condition. The performance of HSSVMs for pattern recognition and regression estimation is also analyzed. Experiments on artificial and real-world domains confirm the feasibility and the validity of our algorithms.     

Fuzzy cognitive map architectures for medical decision support systems

Medical decision support systems can provide assistance in crucial clinical judgments, particularly for inexperienced medical professionals. Fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs) is a soft computing technique for modeling complex systems, which follows an approach similar to human reasoning and the human decision-making process. FCMs can successfully represent knowledge and human experience, introducing concepts to represent the essential elements and the cause and effect relationships among the concepts to model the behavior of any system. Medical decision systems are complex systems that can be decomposed to non-related and related subsystems and elements, where many factors have to be taken into consideration that may be complementary, contradictory, and competitive; these factors influence each other and determine the overall clinical decision with a different degree. Thus, FCMs are suitable for medical decision support systems and appropriate FCM architectures are proposed and developed as well as the corresponding examples from two medical disciplines, i.e. speech and language pathology and obstetrics, are described.     

Situated Interaction in Art

This paper describes metaphors and design strategies used to conceive and develop a hand-held, location-aware tourist guide that delivers information related to the surrounding space mainly by reacting to the physical movements of the visitors. The guide is designed to minimise the boundary between the physical space and the related information through a number of situated and contextual-aware interaction mechanisms. These mechanisms are conceived to support the activity both at individual and social level.     

The state of cognitive systems engineering

The widespread introduction of the personal computer, beginning about 1970, helped spawn the field of inquiry called cognitive engineering, which concerns itself with such things as interface design and user friendliness. Since then, this field has taught us many important things, including two major lessons. First, the road to user-hostile systems is paved with designers' user-centered intentions. Even smart, clever, well-intentioned people can build fragile, hostile devices that force the human to adapt and build local kludges and workarounds. Worse still, even if you are aware of this trap, you will still fall into it. Second, technology developers must strive to build truly human-centered systems. Machines should adapt to people, not the other way around. Machines should empower people. The process of designing machines should leverage what we know about human cognitive, perceptual, and collaborative skills.     

Designing for operations: Towards a sociotechnical systems and cognitive engineering approach to concurrent engineering

In the practice of concurrent engineering, the factors that are considered early in the product design process include manufacturability, assembly, and cost. A set of issues that are not typically considered revolve around the operational requirements for human workers in the manufacturing system. What tasks will human workers accomplish? How will these tasks be organized and coordinated? What information and resources need to be shared? Will the workers have a coherent set of job responsibilities? How should the manufacturing environment be designed to support effective work practices? How can a manufacturing process be designed that also informs organizational structure and takes into account the quality of working life?

The field of sociotechnical systems theory (STS) focuses on exactly these kinds of issues. Rather than subscribing to the usual view of technological determinism — that a complex human-machine system is designed solely with respect to optimization of technical criteria — the goal of STS is to jointly optimize both human and technological considerations in system design and operation. The spirit of STS has much in common with recent work in cognitive systems engineering that advocates the design of joint cognitive systems in which machines serve as flexible, context-sensitive resources for human problem solving. Furthermore, a focus on design teams necessitates the study of the relationship between group work and technology as studied in the field of computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). This paper briefly reviews current research in sociotechnical systems theory, computer-supported cooperative work, and cognitive systems engineering and proposes a framework for integrating operational concerns into the concurrent engineering process. Relevance to industry

To be competitive, organizations need to effectively manage human and technological resources. A key issue is the nature of the information and technological infrastructure that both enables and supports ‘best practice’ across the enterprise. This paper describes such an approach in the context of the ‘operational enterprise’ and provides both a philosophical stance as well as specific examples of software support.