Amadee-20-POLLY

Details

Summary

The experiment aims to evaluate the potential use of a conversational user interface (CUI) for astronaut scientists in an extraterrestrial habitat during the AMADEE-20 expedition. Eventhough guidelines for CUIs were developed decades ago, the interaction with these devices is still complicated; therefore, general design guidelines for human-machine interaction need to be improved. While the studies on understanding the ways people interact with CUIs in everyday scenarios are very recent, there is only a small amount of research on how CUIs can be used in other (more extreme) environments –such as extraterrestrial habitats. CUIs are supposed to assist astronauts on their challenging long-duration missions, in particular, to support them in research-related tasks during space flight or planetary exploration missions.The study shall identify the requirements of a CUI in an extraterrestrial habitat. Much information in that regard is believed to be contained already in the “normal” communication between the crew and mission support. Many requests that could be directed at a CUI will be directed to mission support instead; therefore, the team intends to analyze the mission communication post-hoc. The main question is what kind of information is requested by the crew. Specifically, in the areas of fact checking/informationretrieval, logistics and timing, general conversation, technical issues and exchanges regarding requests to the on-site support team. Such an analysis is expected to provide valuable information for improving our understanding of how a CUI could contribute to a Mars mission and what capabilities it would need to provide. At a more visionary level, we could ask to what extent a (human) mission support team could delegate work to a CUI, leaving more time for more complex trouble-shooting and saving human resources on Earth, ultimately making Mars missions more autonomous.

Experiment Data