Go To Program 149 Noise and Echo Control for Immersive Voice Communication in Spacesuits Yiteng (Arden) Huang 1 1 Wevoice, Inc., New Jersey, United States Collaboration and cooperation between the crewmembers in space and the mission control center on the earth are the lifeline of astronauts and space shuttles. Bright sunlight washes out LCD screens and makes it difficult for astronauts to read instructions, data, or instant messages from a portable electronic device. Clear and reliable voice communications are essential to astronaut safety and the success of every NASA flight mission. But the special design of an astronaut’s spacesuit forms an extreme acoustic environment that imposes unique challenges for capturing and transmitting speech to and from a crewmember. The in-suit acoustic environment is characterized by a highly reflective helmet surface (causing high levels of reverberation) and a spacesuit-unique noise field (noise is generally nonstationary, inherently ideband, and possibly either directional or dispersive). The current solution is a communication cap-based audio (CCA)system which consists of a pair of differential microphones (a redundant design for reliability). The differential microphones need to be close to the astronaut’s mouth, leading to a number of recognized logistical issues and inconveniences particularly during extravehicular activity (EVA) operations which last from 4 to 8 hours. Unfortunately these problems cannot be resolved with incremental improvements to the basic design of the CCA systems. We have been sponsored by the NASA SBIR program to develop an integrated audio (IA) system that can possess similar performance to a CCA while offering astronauts inherent comfort and ease of use. This talk presents our efforts in the last two years that focused primarily on combating noise with microphone arrays mounted on spacesuits. They encompass both algorithm development and real-time prototype implementations with FPGA (field-programmable gate array) processors. We will conclude by describing a number of other acoustic signal processing problems for IA systems. They include control of stereo acoustic echo between inbound and outbound audio, and spatial sound reproduction inside spacesuits. View pdf