Abstract
Nowadays, there is tremendous growth in the Internet of Things (IoT) applications in our everyday lives. The proliferation of smart devices, sensors technology, and the Internet makes it possible to communicate between the digital and physical world seamlessly for distributed data collection, communication, and processing of several applications dynamically. However, it is a challenging task to monitor and track objects in real-time due to the distinct characteristics of the IoT system, e.g., scalability, mobility, and resource-limited nature of the devices. In this paper, we address the significant issue of IoT object tracking in real time. We propose a system called ‘TrackInk’ to demonstrate our idea. TrackInk will be capable of pointing toward and taking pictures of visible satellites in the night sky, including but not limited to the International Space Station (ISS) or the moon. Data will be collected from sensors to determine the system’s geographical location along with its 3D orientation, allowing for the system to be moved. Additionally, TrackInk will communicate with and send data to ThingSpeak for further cloud-based systems and data analysis. Our proposed system is lightweight, highly scalable, and performs efficiently in a resource-limited environment. We discuss a detailed system’s architecture and show the performance results using a real-world hardware-based experimental setup.
Highlights
With the development of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), cellular networks [1], Internet of Things (IoT) applications [2,3,4], and the developments towards the space sciences, there is an increasing demand towards the innovation of satellite design, tracking systems, and their orchestrations at scale [5,6,7,8,9,10,11]
Edge computing is utilised by TrackInk by running the main process flow within the Raspberry Pi device, converting the Two-line Element (TLE) sets into positional data which is further transformed into azimuth and elevation figures that can be sent to servo motors
The Moon and Sun were chosen as objects to follow due to their frequent visibility from Earth being visible by the opened eye, while the International Space Station (ISS) was chosen as the largest artificial satellite
Summary
With the development of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), cellular networks [1], Internet of Things (IoT) applications [2,3,4], and the developments towards the space sciences, there is an increasing demand towards the innovation of satellite design, tracking systems, and their orchestrations at scale [5,6,7,8,9,10,11]. A project that requires a network of numerous small-scale interconnected devices, e.g., for complex optical satellite diagnoses or for three-dimensional (3D) imaging of satellites, a portable, low cost solution is desirable To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose a framework called ‘TrackInk’—a portable, cost-effective, and efficient tracking system that uses publicly available satellite data to track satellites in space (i.e., in orbit). Our proposed framework has the potential to track objects including celestial bodies along with artificial satellites and orbital debris that have publicly available data, Sensors 2022, 22, 608 e.g., from CelesTrak [28]. This system provides the framework for additional projects relating to satellites and orbital debris.
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