Satellite Tracking Antenna with Fuzzy Logic Control

Nisha Gupta, Vibha R. Gupta, Amit Agarwal, Arnab Kr. Das and Uttam Minz Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, Ranchi- 835215, Jharkhand, India g_nisha@lycos.com, rch_vibharch@sancharnet.in

Abstract:
Look Angles provide the Coordinates to which an earth station antenna must be pointed in order to communicate with the satellite. These angles are most commonly specified as Azimuth and Elevation Angles. A small earth station antenna does not require any tracking equipment to track a geo-stationary satellite, hence remain pointed to the satellite at a fixed azimuth and elevation angle. However, when the antenna is mounted on a vehicle such as truck, ship, aircraft etc., tracking equipment becomes an essential part of the receiving/transmitting mobile earth stations. Apart from the necessity of tracking the satellite to compensate for the motion of the vehicle, the tracking equipment should have provision to cope up with imprecision due to turbulent environment of the vehicle in motion and the imprecision factors prevalent in the sensor data. For an antenna embedded in a turbulent mobile environment, signal transmission and reception is a tedious task and to achieve the successful communication with the satellite the physical orientation of the antenna i.e. its azimuth and elevation should remain constant in the course of its motion. In the turbulent mobile environment, there is an offset in its orientation, which is random in nature. To cope up with the varying and uncertain random feature inherent to the antenna tracking process and also to incorporate the imprecision factors caused by the sensor and turbulent environment, the Fuzzy Logic [1] approach can be adopted suitably. Fuzzy Logic works through the use of Fuzzy sets collection of objects, which are less rigid than traditional sets. In traditional sets, an object is either in the set or not in the set. But in Fuzzy Logic an object can exist in between. The Fuzzy Logic Controller [2] is designed to deal with situations where the available data is imprecise, vague, inaccurate and uncertain. In the present paper, a novel technique incorporating Fuzzy Logic approach has been adopted which enables the antenna to readjust itself to the desired azimuth and elevation angles. A Fuzzy Logic controller has been simulated on MATLAB version 6.1 using SIMULINK. The two inputs to the simulator are the Azimuth and Elevation angles and are the desired values. To depict the random nature of the turbulence the random errors are fed to either or any one of the inputs. The resultant signals are then fed to Fuzzy Logic Controller (FLC). Thus the FLC receives the two signals as change in azimuth and change in elevation. Depending on the if-then rules the controller decides its course and feeds its output to two individual files namely aziantenna and eleantenna. The response sent by the controller to the respective files is again normalized to scale

ranging between 0 to 1 and fed back to the error. This reduction in error is carried out continuously until the point is reached when the difference in the error is within the tolerance limits. We have incorporated a check condition for terminating the simulation. This depends on the value of the error (constant) fed and the feedback value. Membership functions used ========================== input variables membership function used --------------------------------------1. change in azimuth | gauss bell 2. change in elevation | gauss bell output variables ---------------1. change in azimuth | 2. change in elevation |

gaussian gaussian

References 1. Zadeh, L. A. Fuzzy Logic, IEEE Computing Magazine, pp. 83-93, April 1988 . 2. Tseng, H. C. and Hwang, V. H., Servo Controller Tuning with Fuzzy Logic, IEEE Transaction on Control Systems Technology, Vol. I, No. 4, Dec. 1993.