Augmented and virtual reality support tool for ground station equipment and telescopes
Programme
GSTP
Programme Reference
GT1O-310GD
Prime Contractor
TERMA GMBH
Start Date
End Date
Status
Closed
Country
Germany
Objectives
The objective of this activity is to develop procedure execution support tools for ground stations and telescopes equipment, which utilize Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) techniques.
Description
Ground Stations and Telescopes are often in remote geographical locations. The local staff do often not possess the required skills and/or knowledge to perform all tasks related to configuration, maintenance and operation of the hardware equipment. As a result, more experienced engineers must travel to the sites to perform the respective tasks.
This problem is not unique to ground stations, the automotive industry has, since a number of years, invested in the development of maintenance procedure support tools that employ Augmented Reality (AR) techniques. The local staff uses a tablet to carry out car maintenance procedures. The procedure support tool augments his view of the hardware equipment with additional information relevant to the current step of a procedure. This additional information can be drawings, technical information, visual augmentation, animations (e.g. color-coding the right place where a screw shall be opened or animating the installation of a hose into the fitting slot). The same techniques are also used in training scenarios as well as for tele-operations, where a local operator is performing the tasks, while a remote operator sees his exact view and can provide detailed information by directly augmenting the view of the local operator.
This activity will have to phase with some challenges: First to deal with a numerous number of tools available in the market considering support to AR/VR content and interactive behaviour, then the possibility to integrate 3M models from external libraries and finally the need to avoid the patchwork of different tools to designing the images interactions.
The above use cases are also of high relevance for human space operations (e.g. Astronaut operations on the International Space Stations).
The proposed activity shall include the following tasks:
-
- Select a set of use cases for the Ground Stations and Telescopes. The activity shall cover the use cases for training, simulation, operations preparation as well as operations (including maintenance and reconfiguration of equipment).
- Define requirements and functionalities for the selected cases
- Analyse the possibility of reuse the developed AR/VR procedure authoring tool chain of previous activities and build on top of it for developing support tooling for the maintenance, procedure execution and tele-operation use cases of Ground Stations and telescope hardware equipment.
- Implement the selected use cases in a qualification model, including the connectivity of the end-to-end MMIs.
- Validate the implementation in shadow deployment, using operational systems and representative mission data. ;
- Produce lessons learnt and final presentation;
Application Domain
Generic Technologies
Technology Domain
12 - Ground Station Systems and Networks
Competence Domain
8-Ground Systems and Mission Operations
Keywords
47-OPS-INN
Initial TRL
TRL 3
Target TRL
TRL 7
Achieved TRL
TRL 5
Public Document
Executive Summary