mkv-hands

Space Glove: Spacecraft Gesture and Voice Commanding

Project Review

Interacting with computer systems while wearing spacesuit uniforms is the issue that our team chose to address. Through our innovative ideas we will ease astronaut’s accessing methods and their way of controlling applications out of their reach. Our project represents a simple utility glove as a solution, by having everything in the palms of Astronauts hands, the keyboard the mouse and much more. The right glove will replace a special designed mouse and the left glove a keyboard, and a single button for the priority synchronization with the equipment. The keys can be membrane silicone rubber press keys. The gloves need a battery to supply the connection with the devices via Bluetooth. And it is requires a Bluetooth chip for the communication of the glove with the other devices

Keyboard In the Astronauts right hand glove you will find the designed keyboard as in the figure.

In this keyboard we used an old standard of key positioning that can be useful because of the glove form and the fingers of our hand. Mouse

On the right hand we have the controlling part, which includes the mouse, the click buttons and room for a lot of other customizable controls. For moving the cursor we used two PointSticks devices which can be found in different laptops, mousses etc. . . Two PointSticks were needed because with the thick gloves, accuracy would be a problem. Trying to solve that, we decided to use one Point Stick with a configured high sensitivity for long range cursor moving and the second one with a lower sensitivity when the user has to curse on small buttons, making navigation easier when high accuracy is needed.

Sync Key Sync Key is a key used in a special situation. The gloves would normally auto sync as soon as they are in the operating range of different devices in and out around the space craft. The sync button will be handily useful, when there’ll be two or more devices in the same operative range and to solve this we are going to implement a set by priority algorithm. Every time we click the sync key, the gloves will connect to the second lowest priority device regarding the device that it’s currently connected to. A more advanced optimal method of using the sync key, can be used by holding the sync key for more than 3 seconds, this would enable the keyboard access by choosing the desired device by pressing the respective number of the device form a scheme one some screen, to connect to that device directly without going in every level of the priority regulation. Communication of the glove and other devices Communication interferences When the glove enters in the range of a device, it synchronizes automatically and the communication starts immediately, the range of the device and the communication priority is defined in the software level, higher priority devices will connect a wider description which is given below. The green fill of the circle in the drawing indicates automatic sync-mode.

This drawing visualizes the process of auto disconnecting after the user steps out of the operating range, note that some devices will have wider or shorter ranges depending on different needs.

In cases where there are two or more devices in the same range, we will prioritize devices in a high to low, lower, lowest step by step to be synced to after hitting the sync next button. Implementation of interrupts for priority ranking

In this case the drawing shows that the glove is in the middle of the range of three different receiving devices and the top priority device will be synced automatically. If we want to choose the lower devices, we only have to click the sync button once for every level we need.

The priority syncing will have an algorithm of checking if the top priority device is available to start communication, if not it will jump to the next lower ranked device and there will not be any interfering with other logged on users. With these two options, first, if there is no response after the request, and second by switching of the broadcast of the device during the time that its logged on. • Priority protocols Normally the priority leveling has to be very advaced, only jumping to the lower priority device with a sync button would be rather stupid than smart, for this we came with a idea of a protocol which would inlude thre level's of prioritizing two of which will be computer intellegentely organized and one would be human implemented and unchanglable without special premision. The first level of the protocol would be priortizing by the use frequency,intellegent rearangin of level's. The devices that are use frequentely would be on the higher part op the priorit rank, but would be changed in between intellegentely by the operating system, the more critical devices would be the lowest in the ranking due to security reasons. The second part is the Human implemented raking, oblviousley we are talking about diffirent tasks the astronouts would have, normally this would be also an speed optimization, if a worker only need's to accses some part's, therefor he would not have accses at all in those devices, in cases of emergency there would be special one time given accsses to that astronout from the comanding roome. The last part would be automaticelly intterupt-driven accsses, we can use some othe already exitent interrupt method such asa level-trigered interupts, edge-trigered or some other standard which would be fufill the special requirments. Voice recognition Today in this age voice recognition, optimization is a thing of the past. We have big libraries like the apple Sire and Google talk, which are over 5 years old. They have stored every word in almost any accent in the spoken English world we would only need to implement some of these libraries: apple’s, Google’s or even open source speech recognition engines and some open source libraries too. That was the reason we didn’t look too much into it since the voice recognition is in a peak state as a technology and the only problem would be the huge size libraries which would take a lot of space. This could be shrinking to an extent by probably by cutting off from the library the words for hard accents of low level English speaker, since anyone working in a NASA space station would have a certain level of language knowledge. Hand Gestures For the time being hand gestures are somehow a relatively primitive tecnology on earth neverles the other additional natural difficulties it would have in space, anyway some useful funcitons would be like opening dors by hovering infront of sensors, shuting down system’s by hovering in a set of movement's and many more. We thought that its not that safe since moving in space is no were near the flexibility you can reach on normal enviroment. Yet this part is something we almost ignored since oure interest was more on the physical asspect of gloves.

Security Since we are operating with a short range connection, the need for security would be low, never less, for any case of possible different device interference, we would use some off the Bluetooth security protocols such as: trusted/untrusted devices, key generated, authentication, un-broadcast id etc. In order to hack through the Bluetooth network the attacker should be around 100m close. There’s another possibility where the range could be boosted up to 1km but that would require special range-extenders on both sides, which normally would not be possible since we will use a low range Bluetooth version and for an attacker to be 100m close to a NASA spacecraft or space station would be impossible .If someone got to be close enough to hack in the Bluetooth network NASA should be worried about other security issues. Realization This project would be relatively easy to make, it comes to life but it has its difficulties. The difficulties are probably more in the aspect of time than a specific problem which will be talked more in details in the end of the documentation. The realization will be easy. Space would not be problems since our parts are small and most of the parts are already part of the astronaut’s space suites we will only need to extend those cables, microchips, buttons and some additional parts. In the project we use a Bluetooth 4.0 chip and the PointSticks shouldn’t be integrated with their chip because it makes it impossible to put them in the finger of the glove. The hardware will be connected with wires and there is needed a programmable chips. Conclusion Jumping to conclusion seems very easye in the begginning, but giving the life takes a lot more components such as: hard work,patience, adding and erasing ideas, differing areas into group participants, the team cooperation and so on. The bigger the team the higher gets the level of being concrete to certain points considering our short group of members it was hard to go deep in details. Anyway taking a close look from the other side of the medal, makes it much more positive when you see people from diffirent fields involved together into a single project. After all, the most important part of it is watching the result comming up clearley in every single word gathered and based on concrete facts, which is the very beggining seemed the abstraciton itself.

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