PI-in-a-box: Intelligent onboard assistance for spaceborne experiments in vestibular physiology

In construction is a knowledge-based system that will aid astronauts in the performance of vestibular experiments in two ways: it will provide real-time monitoring and control of signals and it will optimize the quality of the data obtained, by helping the mission specialists and payload specialists make decisions that are normally the province of a principal investigator, hence the name PI-in-a-box. An important and desirable side-effect of this tool will be to make the astronauts more productive and better integrated members of the scientific team. The vestibular experiments are planned by Prof. Larry Young of MIT, whose team has already performed similar experiments in Spacelab missions SL-1 and D-1, and has experiments planned for SLS-1 and SLS-2. The knowledge-based system development work, performed in collaboration with MIT, Stanford University, and the NASA-Ames Research Center, addresses six major related functions: (1) signal quality monitoring; (2) fault diagnosis; (3) signal analysis; (4) interesting-case detection; (5) experiment replanning; and (6) integration of all of these functions within a real-time data acquisition environment. Initial prototyping work has been done in functions (1) through (4).