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On-board autonomy operations for OPS-SAT experiment

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Abstract

Upcoming space missions are requiring a higher degree of on-board autonomy operations to increase quality science return, to minimize closed-loop space-ground decision making, and to enable new scenarios. Artificial Intelligence technologies like Machine Learning and Automated Planning are becoming more and more popular as they can support data analytics conducted directly on-board as input for the on-board decision making system that generates plans or updates them while being executed. This paper describes the planning and execution architecture under development at the European Space Agency to target this need of autonomy for the ops-sat mission.

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Notes

  1. Depending on weather conditions, an image can be “too cloudy” and the target invisible.

  2. Considering the distance between two adjacent images, δlat and δlong, and level the number of ‘circles’ around the target that should be analyzed, we have, ∀i,j = −level,...,level:

    $$x^{\prime}=x+i*\delta_{lat} $$
    $$y^{\prime}= y+j*\delta_{long} $$

  3. The attitude defines configuration and orientation of the satellite.

  4. Or that would result in cumbersome or extremely expensive modeling.

  5. The experiment presented here uses the Nanosat Mission Operation Framework ([2]). The nmf and the Experiment are implemented in Java 8. To run the experiment on the computer, we use the Netbeans IDE 8.2 and to simulate the satellite we use the Nanosat-MO-Simulator (Developer Version 2.0) of the NMF SDK. The Dell Latitude computer we use for this experiment is equipped with Windows 10 64-Bit, 16GB DDR4 SDRAM and an Intel Core i7-7600U with 2 cores and 2.89GHz processing speed. To test the experiment on real hardware, we use a MitySOM 5CSx System on Module dual-core 800MHz ARM Processor running with a Linux distribution named Ångström 32-Bit.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. European Space Agency - ESA/ESOC, Robert-Bosch-Strasse 5, 64293, Darmstadt, Germany

    Simone Fratini & Nicola Policella

  2. VisionSpace Technologies GmbH, Robert-Bosch-Strasse 7, 64293, Darmstadt, Germany

    Ricardo Silva & Joao Guerreiro

Authors
  1. Simone Fratini
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  2. Nicola Policella
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  3. Ricardo Silva
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  4. Joao Guerreiro
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Correspondence to Simone Fratini.

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This article belongs to the Topical Collection: Special issue on Artificial intelligence in practice - from theory to application

Guest Editors: Franz Wotawa, Gerhard Friedrich and Ingo Pill

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Fratini, S., Policella, N., Silva, R. et al. On-board autonomy operations for OPS-SAT experiment. Appl Intell 52, 6970–6987 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489-020-02158-5

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