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International Space Station life support hardware is controlled mainly from the ground by executing standard operating procedures. While some on-board software exists for safety purposes, most commands are sent from ECLSS ground controllers to achieve mission objectives. This will prove unwieldy for extended operations with increasing time delays. This paper presents a new approach to encoding standard operating procedures that provides a path to greater autonomy in life support operations. Software tools will allow for adjustable automation of procedures from either the ground or on-board. The Cascade Distiller System (CDS) being tested at NASA Johnson Space Center is used as an example system.

Human interaction challenges for intelligent environmental control software involve finding the right balance between automation and the flexibility for human involvement. Automation is needed to relieve people from the tedium of maintaining a vigilant watch over low-level sensor data and controlling each life support hardware item individually. Flexibility is needed to deal effectively with anomalies and novel situations. This paper discusses strategies for supporting management by exception and shows how those strategies were implemented in support of the automated control system for product gas transfer during the Phase III Test of the Lunar/Mars Life Support Test Program.

A Lunar habitat will require a level of automation that is much greater than previous human space missions. The complexity of the habitat, the distance (and time delay) between the habitat and ground controllers and the fact that the habitat may be uncrewed for periods of time all point towards increased automation of the habitat. NASA JSC is developing an integrated testbed for exploring operational concepts for a Lunar habitat that includes significant automation. The testbed allows for early investigation of the hardware and software design decisions and their impacts on operating a Lunar habitat. The testbed also allows for investigation into the robustness of different automation concepts with respect to failures and perturbations of the system. The testbed consists of both dynamic simulations of habitat systems and some physical hardware-in-the-loop.

NASA exploration missions require a small group of humans to live in hostile environments for extended time periods. Under such circumstances it is necessary to provide automated regenerative life support systems that can be managed by a few people. The Distributed Collaboration and Interaction (DCI) System ensures safe, effective operations with such automated systems by aiding humans in supervising and using control automation while working remote from the physical system. In this paper we describe DCI and present the results of using it to assist control engineers remotely supervising an automated water recovery subsystem during a ground test at JSC.