Reaction Wheels Fault Isolation Onboard 3-Axis Controlled Satel-lite using Enhanced Random Forest with Multidomain Features

Abstract

As the number of satellite launches increases each year, it is only natural that an interest in the safety and monitoring of these systems would increase as well. However, as a system becomes more complex, generating a high-fidelity model that accurately describes the system becomes complicated. Therefore, imploring a data-driven method can provide to be more beneficial for such applications. This research proposes a novel approach for data-driven machine learning techniques on the detection and isolation of nonlinear systems, with a case-study for an in-orbit closed loop-controlled satellite with reaction wheels as actuators. High-fidelity models of the 3-axis controlled satellite are employed to generate data for both nominal and faulty conditions of the reaction wheels. The generated simulation data is used as input for the isolation method, after which the data is pre-processed through feature extraction from a temporal, statistical, and spectral domain. The pre-processed features are then fed into various machine learning classifiers. Isolation results are validated with cross-validation, and model parameters are tuned using hyperparameter optimization. To validate the robustness of the proposed method, it is tested on three characterized datasets and three reaction wheel configurations, including standard four-wheel, three-orthogonal, and pyramid. The results prove superior performance isolation accuracy for the system under study compared to previous studies using alternative methods (Rahimi & Saadat, 2019, 2020).