Study on Synthetic Evaluation of Human Performance in Manually Controlled Spacecraft Rendezvous and Docking Tasks

Abstact: Manually Controlled Spacecraft Rendezvous and Docking (MCRVD) is a complex and demanding task which requires astronauts to performe accurate control of the spacecraft in six-degree-of-freedom by hand. The purpose of this study is to measure the human performance in these tasks and to propose a mathematical model to evaluate MCRVD performance quantitatively.A ground simulated RVD platform was developed and 25 male volunteers aged 25-35 were selected. They performed a total number of 3500 experiments. According to the analysis of the control bias during MCRVD, it is found that these parameters are of stage characteristics. The process of MCRVD can be divided into three stages: tracking control stage (100m-20m distance), accurate control stage (20m-0m distance) and docking stage (0m). The performance indexes of tracking control stage and accurate control stage are relevant, while the precision index during docking reflects the difficulty of control in different degrees-of-freedom. Based on the characteristics of different parameters, several statistical techniques including the factor analysis, the entropy analysis, and expert scoring are utilized to analyze the weight coefficient of each performance index. After that we presented a novel multi-hiberarchy integrated evaluation method which includes four hiberarchy: the performance of the tracking control, the performance of the accurate control, the precision of docking and the result of docking. Finally，the method was utilized to analyze the human performance in MCRVD, which verifies the validity of our method.