An intelligent decision-making system for flood monitoring from space

This paper presents the results of a feasibility study on intelligent image processing and decision-making for flood monitoring on board satellites. The ability to detect temporal changes in images is one of the most important functions in intelligent image processing systems for hazard and disaster monitoring applications. An automatic change detection system is proposed, the purpose of which is to monitor particular areas on Earth and give warnings to the authorities if any flooding events are detected. A novel solution to flood detection based on combined use of optical multispectral imagery and GPS reflectometry data is introduced. A fuzzy inference engine is used in the decision-making process, which generates control signals to other subsystems on board the satellite

Design of an Adaptive Neurofuzzy Inference Control System for the Unified Power-Flow Controller

This paper presents a new approach to control the operation of the unified power-flow controller (UPFC) based on the adaptive neurofuzzy inference controller (ANFIC) concept. The training data for the controller are extracted from an analytical model of the transmission system incorporating a UPFC. The operating points' space is dynamically partitioned into two regions: 1) an inner region where the desired operating point can be achieved without violating any of the UPFC constraints and 2) an outer region where it is necessary to operate the UPFC beyond its limits. The controller is designed to achieve the most appropriate operating point based on the real power priority. In this study, the authors investigated and analyzed the effect of the system short-circuit level on the UPFC operating feasible region which defines the limitation of its parameters. In order to illustrate the effectiveness of the control algorithm, simulation and experimental studies have been conducted using the MATLAB/SIMULINK and dSPACE DS1103 data-acquisition board. The obtained results show a clear agreement between simulation and experimental results which verify the effective performance of the ANFIC controller

Design and Implementation of Adaptive PID and Adaptive Fuzzy Controllers for a Level Process Station

This proposed work proposes the design and real-time implementation of an adaptive fuzzy logic controller (FLC) and a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller for adaptive gain scheduling that can be configured for any complex industrial nonlinear application. Initially, the open-loop test of the single-input single-output (SISO) system, with nonlinearities and disturbances, is conducted to represent the mathematical model of the process around a set of equilibrium points. The adaptive controllers are then developed and deployed by using the national instruments reconfigurable input/output data acquisition device (NI RIO), NI myRIO-1900, and the control parameters are adapted in real-time corresponding to the changes in the process variable. The resulting servo and regulatory performance of the controllers are compared in MATLAB® software. The adaptive fuzzy controller is deduced to be the better controller as it can generate the desired output with quicker settling times, fewer oscillations, and negligible overshoot

Artificial Intelligence for Small Satellites Mission Autonomy

Space mission engineering has always been recognized as a very challenging and innovative branch of engineering: since the beginning of the space race, numerous milestones, key successes and failures, improvements, and connections with other engineering domains have been reached. Despite its relative young age, space engineering discipline has not gone through homogeneous times: alternation of leading nations, shifts in public and private interests, allocations of resources to different domains and goals are all examples of an intrinsic dynamism that characterized this discipline. The dynamism is even more striking in the last two decades, in which several factors contributed to the fervour of this period. Two of the most important ones were certainly the increased presence and push of the commercial and private sector and the overall intent of reducing the size of the spacecraft while maintaining comparable level of performances. A key example of the second driver is the introduction, in 1999, of a new category of space systems called CubeSats. Envisioned and designed to ease the access to space for universities, by standardizing the development of the spacecraft and by ensuring high probabilities of acceptance as piggyback customers in launches, the standard was quickly adopted not only by universities, but also by agencies and private companies. CubeSats turned out to be a disruptive innovation, and the space mission ecosystem was deeply changed by this. New mission concepts and architectures are being developed: CubeSats are now considered as secondary payloads of bigger missions, constellations are being deployed in Low Earth Orbit to perform observation missions to a performance level considered to be only achievable by traditional, fully-sized spacecraft. CubeSats, and more in general the small satellites technology, had to overcome important challenges in the last few years that were constraining and reducing the diffusion and adoption potential of smaller spacecraft for scientific and technology demonstration missions. Among these challenges were: the miniaturization of propulsion technologies, to enable concepts such as Rendezvous and Docking, or interplanetary missions; the improvement of telecommunication state of the art for small satellites, to enable the downlink to Earth of all the data acquired during the mission; and the miniaturization of scientific instruments, to be able to exploit CubeSats in more meaningful, scientific, ways. With the size reduction and with the consolidation of the technology, many aspects of a space mission are reduced in consequence: among these, costs, development and launch times can be cited. An important aspect that has not been demonstrated to scale accordingly is operations: even for small satellite missions, human operators and performant ground control centres are needed. In addition, with the possibility of having constellations or interplanetary distributed missions, a redesign of how operations are management is required, to cope with the innovation in space mission architectures. The present work has been carried out to address the issue of operations for small satellite missions. The thesis presents a research, carried out in several institutions (Politecnico di Torino, MIT, NASA JPL), aimed at improving the autonomy level of space missions, and in particular of small satellites. The key technology exploited in the research is Artificial Intelligence, a computer science branch that has gained extreme interest in research disciplines such as medicine, security, image recognition and language processing, and is currently making its way in space engineering as well. The thesis focuses on three topics, and three related applications have been developed and are here presented: autonomous operations by means of event detection algorithms, intelligent failure detection on small satellite actuator systems, and decision-making support thanks to intelligent tradespace exploration during the preliminary design of space missions. The Artificial Intelligent technologies explored are: Machine Learning, and in particular Neural Networks; Knowledge-based Systems, and in particular Fuzzy Logics; Evolutionary Algorithms, and in particular Genetic Algorithms. The thesis covers the domain (small satellites), the technology (Artificial Intelligence), the focus (mission autonomy) and presents three case studies, that demonstrate the feasibility of employing Artificial Intelligence to enhance how missions are currently operated and designed