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The purpose of Regenerative Life Support Systems (RLSS) is to support human life by regenerating resources. To date, the design procedure of RLSS has not been generalized as compared with that for automobiles, airplanes, ships or others entities. In this paper, we first analyzed the sub-goals needed to achieve the top-level goal of “support human life by regenerating resources”. This was done by extracting functions to describe each sub-goal and expressing the design process in a hierarchical manner. Next, we proposed the design methodology of determining element attributes to achieve these functions. Furthermore, in this design methodology, the element attributes of systems were determined to ensure the robustness of the systems against unexpected events in material circulation. In this paper, we discuss a generalized-conceptual design methodology for RLSS and apply that concept to Bioregenerative Life Support Systems (BRLSS).

The toe-change of road-wheel, so-called compliance-steer(CS), caused by suspension compliance is proved to occur around a steady instantaneous center under steady run at constant speed. The adverse/proverse CS, that increases/decreases the side-slip angle versus the velocity vector of vehicle, is realized by locating the center rearward/forward of the axle. By designing the front/rear wheel CS as a proverse/adverse CS with nonlinear compliance that is large at on-center but small at off-center, vehicle characteristics to reduce lateral deviation caused by disturbance and to improve tracking performance are possible.

This paper deals with the steering system with conventional round steering-wheel from the view point of Steer-by-Wire system design. Steering gear ratio and control force characteristics are selected as interface variables of the steering system. The concept of ideal steering gear ratio which is derived on the basis of mapping of steering wheel angle and vehicle path angle is proposed to determine steering gear ratio. Simulator experiments are conducted to investigate the effects of interface variables on system and driver’s control performance. Validity of proposed ideal steering gear ratio would be confirmed. Candidates for objective task performance measure to define desirable control force characteristics would be determined from the test results.