ARAMIS: Augmented Reality Application for Maintenance, Inventory and Stowage

Abstract

The crew time is one of the most important ISS’ resource. Time for maintenance, housekeeping and ordinary activities, including stowage tasks, has to be optimized, so to have more time for science and experimentation. The agencies and industries, involved in ISS operations, continuously study and apply new methodologies, processes and technologies to improve and effectively and efficiently perform these activities, minimizing the possibility of crew error, increasing their autonomy and reducing the execution times. In business contexts, the technology of augmented reality is spreading with increasing speed and flexibility, which allows to “enhance” human sensory perception by adding layers of information. The aim of ARAMIS, developed as an iOS application for the ISS iPad Air 2, is to demonstrate that AR technology can be adopted to reduce the crew time while improving efficiency, and in parallel that having all the information available on a single portable device can improve the overall operations efficiency. Currently, crew is using procedures, messages, logs, in paper copy or via laptops to support operations, continuously changing their point of view between the working area and the information sources, with a loss of focus and waste of time, and with limitation in the amount of information available in the same time. The paper describes the ARAMIS experience starting from the concept, the development and the operational phase splitted into two different scenarios (maintenance in Node 2 and stowage into PMM) that were performed by the Italian astronaut, Paolo Nespoli, during his VITA missions. ASI (Agenzia Spaziale Italiana) has granted access to the ISS utilization resources thanks to the memorandum of understanding (MoU) with NASA. For the VITA Mission, ASI availed itself of the industrial support services for the payload integration process, operations and logistics provided by Kayser Italia.