Research Summaries

Back Increasing Sensor Efficiency for Small Satellite Maritime Domain Awareness

Fiscal Year 2019
Division Research & Sponsored Programs
Department NPS Naval Research Program
Investigator(s) Karpenko, Mark
Sponsor NPS Naval Research Program (Navy)
Summary Maritime awareness involves periodically establishing a ship’s location (detection) and estimating the location of the vessel between detections (prediction). Predicting a ship’s location based on previous detections can be done using a filter, but to maintain an accurate track, it is necessary to detect a ship again in the future. This drives mission requirements such as sensor revisit rates. In this project we ask whether the throughput of a small satellite constellation can be improved by operating the satellite’s sensors more efficiently. That is, rather than following standard search patterns, we propose to improve detection frequency by designing a sensor search pattern that maximizes the probability of detection. To improve detection efficiency, physics based models of the small satellite and its sensors will be used to construct a mathematical problem formulation for search. This problem can then be solved using pseudospectral dynamic optimization to give the ideal search pattern for detecting vessels that can additionally leverage previous knowledge of the vessel locations. Because Pseudospectral dynamic optimization can solve a search problem quickly and efficiently, the idea can (in theory) be scaled to accommodate search for multiple vessels using a single or multiple sensors in a constellation.

The methodology/plan for this project includes identifying a relevant awareness scenario, developing models of a ship and the sensor probability of detection, determining an example search pattern using Pseudospectral optimization.

Deliverables for this project include a demonstration of the new concept for improving sensor detection efficiency, the thesis of any contributing NPS student(s), any conference and/or journal papers resulting from this effort as well as an end-of-project Executive Summary and NRP Research Poster. The proposed PI has security access appropriate for this project.
Keywords
Publications Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal