1U CubeSatでのバイナリ画像分類用に設計された畳み込みニューラルネットワーク

As of 2020, more than a thousand CubeSats have been launched into space. The nanosatellite standard allowed launch providers to utilize empty spaces in their rockets while giving educational institutions, research facilities and commercial start-up companies the chance to build, test and operate satellites in orbit. This exponential rise in the number of CubeSats has led to an increasing number of diverse missions. Missions on astrobiology, state-of-art technology demonstration, high revisit-time earth observation and space weather have been implemented. In 2018, NASA’s JPL demonstrated CubeSat’s first use in deep space by launching MarCO A and MarCO B. The CubeSats successfully relayed information received from InSight Mars Lander in Mars to Earth. Increasing complexity in missions, however, require increased access to data. Most CubeSats still rely on extremely low data rates for data transfer. Size, Weight and Power (SWaP) requirements for 1U are stringent and rely on VHF/UHF bands for data transmission. Kyushu Institute of Technology’s BIRDS-3 Project has downlink rate of 4800bps and takes about 2-3 days to reconstruct a 640x480 (VGA) image on the ground. Not only is this process extremely time consuming and manual but it also does not guarantee that the image downlinked is usable. There is a need for automatic selection of quality data and improve the work process. The purpose of this research is to design a state-of-art, novel Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for automated onboard image classification on CubeSats. The CNN is extremely small, efficient, accurate, and versatile. The CNN is trained on a completely new CubeSat image dataset. The CNN is designed to fulfill SWaP requirements of 1U CubeSat so that it can be scaled to fit in bigger satellites in the future. The CNN is tested on never-before-seen BIRDS-3 CubeSat test dataset and is benchmarked against SVM, AE and DBN. The CNN automatizes images selection on-orbit, prioritizes quality data, and cuts down operation time significantly.九州工業大学博士学位論文 学位記番号：工博甲第510号 学位授与年月日：令和2年12月28日1 Introduction|2 Convolutional Neural Networks|3 Methodology|4 Results|5 Conclusion九州工業大学令和2年