Description
Engineering Minds Munich GmbH has developed a Camera Payload and Processing Unit (CPPU) for in-orbit monitoring and verification of satellite deployables. Reliable confirmation of solar panel or antenna deployment remains challenging for small satellites due to limited telemetry bandwidth and constrained power budgets.
The CPPU provides a compact and dependable solution by integrating camera interfacing, image buffering, and actuator control into a single unit. Cameras can be placed up to 1 m from the processing board, enabling flexible positioning for optimal visibility of critical mechanisms. Built on FPGA and bare-metal software, the platform emphasizes deterministic operation, testability, and robustness in the space environment. A flight model has already been delivered and validated, demonstrating the maturity of the development.
Current developments extend the CPPU with autonomous deployable-shape extraction, using a soft-GPU accelerated pipeline. The approach reduces image data from 8 Mbit to 1.6 kbit (a three orders-of-magnitude reduction) while retaining key geometric information in vectorized format.
