Jennifer Needham

B.S. Mechanical Engineering, Rice University
S.M. Aeronautics and Astronautics, MIT (expected June 2008)
Draper supervisor: Lauren Kessler

For her Master’s theses research, Needham is helping to design the Human Interactive Mission Manager (HIMM) which merges the fields of human supervisory control and intelligent autonomous systems. The objective is to enable dynamic participation in real-time mission planning. This project builds upon Draper’s ADEPT architecture developed for intelligent autonomy and introduces human interaction capabilities at various levels of the hierarchy.

While ADEPT has been successfully applied to unmanned air, undersea, and space vehicles, the HIMM’s capabilities will be demonstrated as part of a crewed lunar landing system which faces such challenges as high precision landing on any region of the moon and under any lighting conditions. With demands that far exceed those of the Apollo missions, lunar landing systems for future missions need to become more automated and thus more complex to provide astronauts with sufficient information to keep them in-the-loop and prepared to detect and respond to anomalies.

Needham said, “My contribution to this project is to study the human interaction mechanisms of the mission manager through cognitive models and known lunar landing records in the context state-of-theart lunar landing architectures. Based on this research, I am developing display concepts that will be implemented and tested through human subject experimentation with a fixed based simulator at Draper. Ultimately, display requirements and recommendations will be generated for operator interactions during the next lunar landing.”