Study on synthetic evaluation of human performance in manually controlled spacecraft rendezvous and docking tasks

Abstract

Manual-Control Rendezvous and Docking (MCRVD) is a complex and demanding task which requires astronauts to control the direction of six-freedom of the spacecraft accurately by hand. Its performance has a close relationship among the design of the spacecraft HCI, the control ability of the astronaut, and the matching effect of the two factors above. In this paper, human performance for these tasks was measured and a mathematical model to evaluate MCRVD performance quantitatively was proposed. First, 3500 experiments were designed on a ground simulated RVD system to examine characteristics and regulations of MCRVD performance indexes, such as control deviation, fuel consumption etc. Twenty-five male volunteers aged 25-35 participated in the experiment. Analysis predicts that the performance indexes of MCRVD show the characteristics and laws of stages. The process of MCRVD can be divided into three stages: tracking control (about more than 20m distance), accurate control (less than 20m distance) and docking stage (0m). The performance indexes of tracking and accurate control show the relevance of characteristics, and the precision index of docking reflects the difficulty of control the direction of the spacecraft. For that reason, several statistics techniques, such as the factor analysis method, the entropy analysis method etc, are utilized to analyze the weight coefficient of each performance index. After that we presented a novel multi-hierarchy integrated evaluation method, which includes four hierarchies: the performance of the tracking control, the performance of the accurate control, the precision of docking and the result of docking. Finally we utilized this method to analyze the human performance in MCRVD, which verifies the validity of our method. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.