Image Acquisition Planning for Earth Observation Satellites with a Quantum Annealer

Understand

We present a comparison study of state-of-the-art classical optimisation methods to a D-Wave 2000Q quantum annealer for the planning of Earth observation missions.

• The problem is to acquire high value images while obeying the attitude manoeuvring constraint of the satellite.
• In order to investigate close to real-world problems, we created benchmark problems by simulating realistic scenarios.
• Our results show that a tuned quantum annealing approach can run faster than a classical exact solver for some of the problem instances.