Artificial vision assisted ground fine pointing system for experimental optical link for CubeSat communications

Abstract

Abstract Considering the continuous increase of demands in satellite communications, it is imperative to determine systems with higher bandwidths. Furthermore, miniaturization trends coming from the development of nanosatellites as CubeSat’s, constitute great restrictions to their design. Optical communications have the potential to lead with current data rates requirements. Nevertheless, the establishment of ground-LEO (Low Earth Orbit) optical links poses several challenges such as very strict and accurate tracking mechanisms, effects provoked due to the environmental conditions on the light beam as well as attenuation and Doppler effects. In this work, the precision of the tracking mechanisms is tackled by employing artificial vision as a proposal for a fine tracking system for an optical ground station to be able to locate a LEO CubeSat, so to proceed with data acquisition and tracking stages. The innovative and highly efficient algorithm herein developed for fine pointing is implemented in LabVIEW® as an example.