JIVE
Astronaut Training in Virtual Reality
Training Astronauts to use the Canadarm 2 on the International Space Station
The Canadarm 2 is a 17 meters-long robotic arm on the ISS. It can move modules, equipment and even astronauts around the station. For that reason, it is particularly used to do maintenance operations and to assist EVA.
All ISS crew members are required to know how to operate the arm from within the station in real-time, which requires a very specific skill. This skill is taught to astronauts in several stages, the first of which being called GRT.
JIVE is an ESA project aiming to reduce the training time of astronauts during GRT. Using VR, we expect to drop from 20 hours to less than 10.
A virtual museum
Teaching R&D
The team is comprised of software engineers and astronaut instructors for ISS robotics, both from ESA and NASA. I’m the main engineer for the JIVE project, tasked with designing and developing the teaching software. This software builds on an older ESA project called VORTEX, where we had a robotic arm working in VR for the first time. (That's something we've shown to IAC 2018). The JIVE software features a functional replica of the Canadarm 2 in VR, as well as didactic layout organized into multiple rooms.
Each teaching room has a theme, an associated look and feel, as well as a variety of pedagogical demonstrators. Each demonstrator leverages the power of VR to explain things as naturally as possible. Gradually, each room provides new skills: starting by simply naming the parts of the arm, onto manipulating one then several joints at the same time, to finally avoiding obstacles with only camera screens.
Comparative Study
It's about proving effectiveness, not about assuming it.
JIVE aims to test VR for the astronaut training community in Europe, the USA, and Canada. In particular, JIVE aims to prove whether VR can be used effectively to reduce astronaut training time and costs.
To prove the effectiveness of VR, a crucial part of JIVE is a comparative study. There, we focus on measuring training effectiveness and efficiency on both the new VR and old non-VR training flows. Those flows, however, require either 10 or 20 teaching hours to get one data point for the study. To ensure a big enough sample size, ESA's European Astronaut Centre and NASA's Johnson Space Center are taking measurements in parallel.
When enough measurement will be gathered, ESA will have solid proof regarding the effectiveness of VR. If JIVE indeed optimizes GRT training, other astronaut lessons may wish to benefit from VR as well.
