Advancing Intelligent Personal Assistants for Human Spaceflight
Darren Edge, Ha Trinh, Newman Cheng, Joshua Bradley, Alex Chao, Apurva Mody, Steven Truitt, Dasha Metropolitansky, Robert Osazuwa Ness, Jonathan Larson · arXiv (Cornell University) · 2024
The Artemis program and upcoming missions to Mars mark a new era of human space exploration that will require new tools to support astronaut autonomy in the absence of real-time communication with Earth. This paper investigates the role of voice-based intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) in future crewed space missions. Through semi-structured interviews with astronauts (n=3) and spaceflight experts (n=12), we identify key user-centered design requirements for IPAs in this uniquely constrained and safety-critical environment. Our thematic analysis reveals core requirements for flexibility, reliability, offline capability, and multimodal interaction. Drawing on these findings, we outline design guidelines for next-generation IPAs and discuss how technologies such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), knowledge graphs, and augmented reality should be combined to support flexible, reliable, and multimodal IPAs for future human spaceflight missions.