Receive AIS signals from maritime vessels and use on-board ML to detect anomalous behavior (dark shipping, route deviations). Downlink only flagged events to minimize bandwidth and support maritime domain awareness.
Receive AIS signals from maritime vessels and use on-board ML to detect anomalous behavior (dark shipping, route deviations). Downlink only flagged events to minimize bandwidth and support maritime domain awareness.
This is an advanced-level project with an estimated timeline of 18-24 months using a 1U form factor.
Every ocean-going vessel above a certain size is required to broadcast its identity, position, speed, and heading via the Automatic Identification System. These signals propagate well beyond the horizon, making them detectable from low Earth orbit. A space-based AIS receiver captures these maritime broadcasts across entire ocean basins, providing ship tracking data in regions where no coastal radar or terrestrial AIS station can reach. Adding an onboard machine learning layer transforms raw position reports into intelligence detecting vessels that go dark by turning off their transponders, identifying unusual route deviations, and flagging suspicious behavioral patterns. Only flagged events are downlinked, reducing bandwidth requirements while focusing analyst attention on the most interesting activities. The project spans RF receiver design, antenna engineering, signal processing, machine learning, and maritime domain awareness a genuinely interdisciplinary challenge. The main technical hurdle is the antenna: AIS operates at a frequency that requires a relatively long antenna element, which must deploy reliably after launch from a tightly packed configuration.
AIS receivers operate at 162 MHz quarter-wave antenna is ~46 cm, requiring a deployable mechanism (measuring tape antenna with burn-wire release). Satlab Polaris 4-channel AIS receiver (~10,000-15,000) is the standard CubeSat option but expensive. Alternative: RTL-SDR based receiver with custom firmware (lower sensitivity, higher risk). ML anomaly detection runs on ESP32-S3 co-processor using pre-trained model to flag dark shipping and route deviations. Downlink flagged events only.
Aalborg University AAUSAT3 (2013) was the first student satellite to successfully operate an AIS receiver in space, collecting over 700,000 messages in 100 days. AIS at 162 MHz is substantially harder than ADS-B at 1090 MHz because the quarter-wave antenna is ~46 cm requiring deployable mechanism one of the highest-risk CubeSat subsystems. AIS receivers are expensive (Satlab Polaris 10,000-15,000). Unless antenna deployment is already planned for another subsystem, ADS-B (project 15) is the recommended maritime/aviation tracking variant. Cost: $10,000-$16,000 for commercial receiver or $500-$2,000 for DIY SDR approach (with significantly reduced performance). Complexity: advanced.
This project spans 3 disciplines, making it suitable for interdisciplinary student teams.
Ready to take on this project? Here's a general roadmap that applies to most CubeSat missions:
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