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Motion is not only essential for interacting with the environment but also for its understanding. It has many facets which go beyond simply reaching a goal. Motion information often serves as the basis for inferring interrelationships between events, states and intentions of an acting entity. Observers can often identify persons from afar from their movement alone with only a low resolution view. In this connection it is important to identify dominant factors influencing this sensation. It would also be important to analyze how this understanding of motion relates to our primarily technological, cybernetic understanding of the structure of motion. This paper addresses some issues in this field. By emphasizing the compositional aspect of motion it extends the common technological structuring approach into another dimension. It does not offer a solution but serves as a basis for further discussions. At a first step, a linguistic approach is used for structuring complex motion.

Safety has always been an important issue in the United States space program. One area of particular concern, especially since the Challenger accident, is crew rescue. While much attention has been given to crew rescue during launch and landing, interest in rescuing a stranded EVA crewperson is only beginning to increase now. Although there were orbital EVAs in the Gemini and Apollo programs, they were of short duration, and total excursion ranges were small so reattachment of a safety tether was not required. With maintenance of a piece of real estate as large as space station Freedom, astronauts will have to undo and reattach their tethers to reach remote locations. The increasing number of EVAs in the future also elevates the probability of a tether breaking. A mechanism for recovering from a crew separation needs to be determined to prevent a life being lost on-orbit.

Two experiments were conducted examining three-dimensional pursuit tracking when operators of teleoperation simulations are faced with misalignment between the display and control frames of reference. Targets on the experimental displays moved irregularly in three dimensions and were tracked by subjects using either two 2-axis joysticks and a panel-mounted perspective display or, in a separate experiment, a hand-mounted, 6 degree-of-freedom electro-magnetic sensor and a head-mounted, virtual image, stereoscopic display. Analysis of the components of the tracking errors in the perspective display experiment showed that components of the error due to misalignment of the perspective projection may be linearly separated from those associated with the mismatch between display and control coordinate systems. We observed evidence from both experimental conditions that the tracking improved with several hours practice.

Due to an increase in spacecraft traffic forecasted for the space station era, researchers are investigating manual control and other aspects of docking operations with hopes of increasing safety, productivity, and likelihood of success while decreasing cost. Experiments have been performed which revealed the effect of approach velocity, in-flight anomalies, and control mode. Displays have been designed to enable flight planners to more easily overcome the difficulties presented by orbital mechanics. Improved understanding of human factors in the docking mission and other orbital maneuvers will play a significant role in design tradeoffs concerning thruster size, docking fixture style and mass, and on-board trajectory planning displays.

Future aircraft cockpits may be equipped with both collision avoidance systems and cockpit traffic situation displays. This paper summarizes a series of experiments investigating a pilot's ability to make a variety of traffic related decisions with a traffic display. Some of the key findings were: Pilots were not able to accurately judge the future position of an aircraft unless the display contained predictor symbols. Pilots' subjective judgements of threat were inversely proportional to time to closest approach but generally were not sensitive to small changes of other parameters of the encounter. When pilots were asked to make avoidance maneuvers based solely on the traffic display, they began their maneuvers well before a CAS advisory would have been triggered. Provided sufficient time was available, pilots preferred horizontal avoidance maneuvers.