Modeling Human-Spacesuit Interactions
Conor R. Cullinane
PhD Candidate, MEMP Bioastronautics
Harvard-MIT Health Science & Technology
Manned space flight necessitates life support for crewmembers during extravehicular activities (EVAs) in the form of spacesuit assemblies (SSAs), which should maximize human performance and efficiency, while preventing injury. SSA designs must consider the interaction of mass, volume, walking effort, mobility, agility, and suit fit. Operators wearing earlier EVA suits have developed a variety of injuries in a range of locations, including the shoulder and hip, due to prolonged use, including erythema, abrasions, muscle soreness/fatigue, paresthesia, bruising, blanching, and edema. By increasing mobility and reducing deviations from unsuited operator kinematics, injury risk and metabolic cost may be reduced, and could extend exploration capabilities.
In general, the research in this thesis evaluates how existing and developmental spacesuit designs affect human operator performance and safety and determines methods for improvement. Spacesuits are specialized exosuits that are load-bearing wearable systems that are tightly-coupled or highly integrated with their human operators. The tightly-coupled nature means that exosuit design decisions affecting kinematics (the motion of bodies without references to the forces that cause the motion) and dynamics (the torques and forces that drive the motion) will also change the operator motions through altered human-exosuit interactions. This research leverages both kinematic and dynamic analyses within experiments and computational models to achieve insight into design decisions for tightly-coupled human-exosuit interactions.