This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The objective of this Major Research Instrumentation (MRI-R2) award is to develop a reduced-gravity simulator. Physical simulation of human activities in a reduced gravity condition on Earth is often needed not only for training astronauts but also for aerospace and biomechanics research. Simulation of a reduced gravity condition for a person requires that the person's body parts experience the forces and movements consistent with that condition. This award will enable implementation of an innovative design of a reduced-gravity simulator. Based on robotics and passive gravity compensation technologies, the simulator could offload any amount (from 0% to 100%) of the body weight of a person such that the person moving within the simulator will feel as if he/she were experiencing reduced gravity. The equipment will provide a platform for investigating many research questions, such as how to optimize the design for best dynamic performance; how to identify the mass properties of different body parts; and how to automatically adjust the system for different individuals to achieve the desired level of gravity reduction. A fully functioning, tested, and documented prototype of the proposed simulator will be delivered.
The technology and instrumentation system developed by this project will provide a strong infrastructure at New Mexico State University to advance the current interdisciplinary research and education in aerospace science for manned space exploration and biomechanics science for better understanding of human-body dynamics. The facility could provide a new and low-cost technology for training astronauts and space travelers. It could also be used to create a human motion database including detailed body inertia properties, enhance biomedical research for neuro-rehabilitation of disabled people, and support human performance research for achieving optimal motion gaits. The research team will work with the New Mexico Alliance for Minority Participation to enhance higher education of Hispanic and other minority students.
Physical simulation of human activities in a reduced gravity (including microgravity or zero-gravity) condition on the Earth is often needed for aerospace and biomedical research. Accurate simulation of a reduced gravity condition for a person requires that the person's various body parts experience the gravity forces (and the movements caused by the gravity forces) consistent with that condition. This project developed a new reduced-gravity simulation technology and a corresponding prototype simulator. The simulator can offload any amount of the body weight of a person at a variety of body postures and movements, so that the person moving within the equipment will feel as if he/she were on another planet with less weight or in an orbiting spacecraft without any weight. The simulator is an unpowered passive system during its simulation operation. Unpowered passive systems are usually more reliable and cheaper than their powered active counterparts. For repeatable and efficient set-up of the system for different individuals having different weights, a powered auto-balancing capability was added to the system. This helps adjust the device to a desired gravity level from no gravity to any reduced gravity (e.g., 0% Earth gravity for simulating activities on a small asteroid or in the International Space Station, 16.5% Earth gravity for simulating activities on the Moon, and 37.8% Earth gravity for simulating activities on the Mars). This new technology offers several advances over existing reduced-gravity simulation technologies. For example, it is much cheaper, safer and easier to access and use than the water-based neutral buoyancy and aircraft-based parabolic-trajectory flight technologies which are the two primary technologies currently used by NASA for microgravity simulations. However, it simulates biomechanical effect only while the latter two technologies can simulate both biomechanical and physiological efforts. This technology offers a more realistic simulation than existing counterweight-based or cable-based (string-based) suspension technologies because the simulator offloads the weights of different body parts in compliance with almost all the natural degrees of freedom of human body parts. The other suspension technologies offload weights of different body parts by cables/strings in the vertical direction only. The technology also offers more realistic simulation than the virtual-reality based technology because the latter is mainly visual simulation as opposed to biomechanical simulation. Therefore, this new technology provides an inexpensive and accessible means for researchers to study human performance in reduced-gravity environment and for space industry to train astronauts and to plan/study human tasks in space missions. Discussion with a Houston-based company for commercialization of the new technology for potential applications of astronaut training is currently underway. On the other hand, the reduced-gravity simulator can also be used for healthcare professionals to offload partial body weight of a patient for locomotion or mobility rehabilitation. Along with the development of the reduced-gravity simulator, a state-of-the-art research lab called Reduced-Gravity and Biomechanics Laboratory (RGB lab for short) has been created. Other than the reduced-gravity simulator, the over 1000-square-foot lab is also equipped with a 13-camera motion capture system that accurately measures detailed 3D motions of all the human's body parts; a dual-belt instrumented treadmill for collecting the ground reaction force data exerted on each of the human feet; a commercial body-weight support device for rehabilitation, and a few arm and leg weight offloading devices developed by the research team on the project. This new lab is currently supporting a number of research projects in aerospace engineering, bioengineering, and human performance disciplines. The participating faculty and students are not only from the College of Engineering but also from the College of Education and College of Arts and Sciences. Therefore, the lab has become an excellent platform to foster interdisciplinary research. Finally, the equipment and the RGB lab have also made significant impact on education and outreach. Since the start of the project almost four years ago, seven Ph.D. students, six Master students, and twenty-two undergraduate students have been trained in the RGB Lab by hands on participation in the project. Many more undergraduate students have used the lab equipment and space for their capstone design projects. In addition, five community college students and thirteen high school students were also trained by participating in the research activities in the lab for a summer or semester each. All of the high school students who were trained in the lab have entered NMSU or other universities choosing STEM disciplines as their majors. The RGB lab has also become a showcase of the College of Engineering at NMSU to support the university’s outreach activities. To date, the lab has given numerous tours and workshops to over 1,600 visitors ranging from K-12 students to external researchers as well as elected officials. Many public visitors were impressed by the tours and expressed that the tours helped them better understand aspects of university research.
