Human performance with procedure automation to manage spacecraft systems

A critical resource for meeting the challenges of human exploration beyond near Earth orbit is greater reliance on spacecraft automation. If human-automation integration is not appropriately designed, however, increased automation may contribute to rather than alleviate these challenges. TRACLabs and San Jose State University are investigating the hypothesis that selecting units of work for automation based on procedures written for humans will improve human-automation designs. We conducted an exploratory study with human participants using TRACLabs´ PRIDE software for authoring and executing electronic procedures to perform simulated spacecraft operations. Our research investigates manual, partially automated, and fully automated procedure execution, and support for these multiple modes. We report the results of participant use of automation functions in this paper.