Since humanity has been able to make satellites orbit around the planet Earth, everyone’s life changed: not only due to GPS and wireless communication development; a deeper knowledge of our planet has been reached as well, and this helps in many ways, such as climate change monitoring. As a proof of the importance of the information we gather from Space, the amount of data that is collected by satellites around the Earth has been impressively increasing during the past few years; however, a Space to Earth communication system capable of quickly and efficiently transmitting this data is still missing. Our team identified in Optical Communication the technology candidate to do it. One major challenge when dealing with Optical Communication, however, is the required pointing accuracy of the system: it must point at the ground station with a sensibly higher accuracy with respect to the one required by state-of-the-art communication systems, i.e. Radio Frequency (RF). For this reason, we developed Ronza, an innovative Optical Communication-based system that is able to autonomously locate and point with the required accuracy the target ground station through the use of machine learning algorithms. Our team performed a proof-of-concept in December 2019 where an artificial intelligence-based version of the algorithm was successfully tested, while we worked on the development of the machine learning-based algorithm in the first part of 2020. The objective of this test was to show that the prototype was able to recognize and point to the target ground station while a picture of the area where the ground station is was shown to the camera. All the tests that were performed were successful, testifying the validity of the solution we are proposing.
PRINCIPAL ACADEMIC TUTOR
Sabrina Corpino, DIMEAS, Politecnico di Torino
EXTERNAL INSTITUTIONS
School of Entrepreneurship and Innovation (SEI), Torino
EXTERNAL TUTOR
Massimo Pescarollo
TEAM MEMBERS
Andrea Forestieri, PoliTo
Fabio Ferrari, PoliTo
Riccardo Masiero, PoliMi
Andrea Carlo Morelli, PoliMi
Alessandro Rosso, PoliTo
Stefano Palladino, PoliMi
Tommaso Tassi, PoliMi