Fault Diagnosis of Antenna Pointing Systems Using Hybrid Neural Network and Signal Processing Models

We describe in this paper a novel application of neural networks to system health monitoring of a large antenna for deep space communications. The paper outlines our approach to building a monitoring system using hybrid signal processing and neural network techniques, including autoregressive modelling, pattern recognition, and Hidden Markov models. We discuss several problems which are somewhat generic in applications of this kind - in particular we address the problem of detecting classes which were not present in the training data. Experimental results indicate that the proposed system is sufficiently reliable for practical implementation.