English

Autonomous Payload Thermal Control

Machine Learning 2025-07-03 v3 Systems and Control Systems and Control

Abstract

In small satellites there is less room for heat control equipment, scientific instruments, and electronic components. Furthermore, the near proximity of electronic components makes power dissipation difficult, with the risk of not being able to control the temperature appropriately, reducing component lifetime and mission performance. To address this challenge, taking advantage of the advent of increasing intelligence on board satellites, an autonomous thermal control tool that uses deep reinforcement learning is proposed for learning the thermal control policy onboard. The tool was evaluated in a real space edge processing computer that will be used in a demonstration payload hosted in the International Space Station (ISS). The experiment results show that the proposed framework is able to learn to control the payload processing power to maintain the temperature under operational ranges, complementing traditional thermal control systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2307.15438,
  title  = {Autonomous Payload Thermal Control},
  author = {Alejandro D. Mousist},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.15438},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

To be included in the proceedings of ESA's SPAICE conference at ECSAT, UK, 2024

R2 v1 2026-06-28T11:42:43.467Z