Overview
The big picture
Background
The work of NASA on the International Space Station and at test facilities revolves around carrying out highly specific tasks and locating the tools, materials, and machinery needed to carry out those tasks. Crewmembers and engineers perform detailed tasks for experiments and maintenance by gathering tools and following instructions on static documents, called procedures. Currently, NASA personnel must manually track the location and status of their equipment, so tools are often misplaced, and logs, often unreliable.
ISS
On the ISS, a three-person crew is able to devote 35 hours per week to scientific experiments, but the rest of the crewmembers’ time is required to be spent on maintenance. In order to perform experiments, astronauts must first locate tools and materials stored on the ISS, which spans the size of a football field. Engineers at NASA’s test facilities face many similar inefficiencies. In order to run tests, engineers must gather materials, verify the materials, gather tools, and inspect the machinery. Since their manual logs are often out of date and unreliable, astronauts and engineers waste precious time and cognitive energy in locating their materials.
Our Task
Team Helios has been tasked with understanding the context in which astronauts and engineers find tools and carry out procedures, in order to design a smarter, context-aware system that will increase the efficiency of their work and further NASA’s mission to “reach for new heights and reveal the unknown so that what we do and learn will benefit all humankind.”
