Ambitious space missions will present new challenges for space human factors as crews interact with and maintain complex equipment and automation. This demands that procedures for task design, rehearsal, and procedure refreshing be based on on-ground validated procedure instructions. We wish to investigate requirements for formulating, interpreting, and validating procedure instructions. Crew instructions should express clearly and unambiguously complex actions and their expected results. As NASA moves toward a "what to do" rather than a "how-to-do" approach, it is essential that textual instructions convey what is meant and correlate with equipment function and construction. Natural language instructions must coordinate with graphical simulations to provide both textual and visual guidance and context sensitivity for procedures, especially when the equipment functions and features are accessible to the simulation. Current manuals and procedures need all alternatives to be made explicit, leading to clumsy documentation which must be laboriously prepared in advance. Any documentation for a complex procedure should "understand" the equipment and the human factors of the crew. One important aspect of "what-to-do" procedure documentation is that purposes and termination conditions of continuous processes are very frequently cited. These need to be generated from or interpreted by simulated actions.

Although our focus in this project will be on ground-based procedure execution and validation, we envision future applications to space flight crews who will use natural language to communicate with each other, the on-board automation, and to training and refresher simulations. Our research proposal is to use high level user interfaces--such as natural language instructions--to control virtual crew members so that they may use procedure formulation, validation, in-flight training, crew task allocation, and unusual procedure simulation.

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