Development of an advanced nano-satellite (VELOX-I) - remote sensing camera system

• Main Author: Xing, YiHuan.
• Other Authors: Low Kay Soon
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Computing methodologies::Image processing and computer vision
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/54616
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Small sized satellites in the form of CubeSat have been gaining popularity in many academic institutions in the world due to its simplified system development using various low cost commercially off-the-shelf (COTS) subsystems. Nanyang Technological University of Singapore is developing its first nano-satellite, VELOX-I under its Undergraduate Satellite Programme for launch. This Final Year Project (FYP) explores an alternate lower power solution for VELOX-I’s vision subsystem using a Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) image sensor developed in-house by NTU. The scope of this project consists of hardware design, software and firmware development, and power consumption analysis of the design. The end-product of this project presents a black box device performing data acquisition directly into the memory of a microcontroller, and is capable of a mass storage device in the form of a Secure Digital (SD) card. Future projects can then leverage on this black box to implement post-processing algorithms to support other VELOX-I’s missions, such as Earth observation. A prototype has been developed for this project and demonstrates the capability of controlling and acquiring data from the image sensor successfully. The results show that the imaging system consumes 1.441 watts and 3.184 watts during idle and an image capture cycle respectively, down from approximately 7.5 watts with the existing solution. In summary, this project contributes an alternate solution to reduce the power consumption of the imaging system on-board NTU’s VELOX-I satellite by up to 80.8%.