Nebula Public Library

The knowledge bank of ESA’s R&D programmes

A Comparative Study Of High-Level And Low-Level Implementations Of Deep Learning Models For Spacecraft

Programme
Discovery
Programme Reference
21-D-S-OPS-02-e
Start Date
End Date
Status
Closed
Country
Canada
A Comparative Study Of High-Level And Low-Level Implementations Of Deep Learning Models For Spacecraft
Description

In this activity, Mission Control Space Services deployed a low-level implementation of the OPS-SAT SmartCam model using a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), comparing against a high-level CPU model using Tensorflow Lite. Experiments showed that the FPGA implementation reproduced the precision and accuracy of the high-level model, while running at a slower speed. Further optimisations of the FPGA are expected to close the gap in timing and unlock new methods for deploying deep learning on spacecraft.

Executive summary
Final presentation