Aiding Supervision of Automated Life Support Systems

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.