Ubotica Technologies announced that its Artificial Intelligence technology has successfully enabled the first ever hardware-accelerated AI inference of Earth Observation images on an in-orbit satellite.

This historic event has been achieved onboard Pi-sat-1, the European Space Agency's (ESA) Artificial Intelligence (AI) demonstration cubesat that was launched on a Vega rocket on September 3rd. Initial data downlinked from the satellite has shown that the AI-powered automatic cloud detection algorithm has correctly sorted hyperspectral Earth Observation (EO) imagery from the satellite's sensor into cloudy and non-cloudy data.

Pi-sat-1 is part of an ambitious and ground-breaking programme, funded by ESA and supported by Enterprise Ireland, for the demonstration and validation of state-of-the-art Deep Learning technology applied in-orbit for autonomously processing Earth Observation data. This successful application of the Ubotica CVAI Artificial Intelligence technology, which is powered by the Intel Movidius Myriad 2 Vision Processing Unit, has demonstrated real on-board data processing autonomy, laying a foundation stone for the path to advanced Deep Learning applied to satellite data at source.

Decision making on-board Pi-sat-1, rather than on the ground, has been shown to enable pre-filtering of EO data so that only relevant images with usable information are downlinked to the ground, thereby improving bandwidth utilisation and significantly reducing aggregated downlink costs.

This is the first of a number of programmes in which Ubotica is working with leading players in the European space sector to enable the development and deployment of highly performant Artificial Intelligence applications in space, in a time and cost-efficient manner, using Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) components. The Pi-sat-1 demonstrator has been developed by an ESA-funded consortium involving Ubotica Technologies (IE), cosine remote sensing (NL), Sinergise (SI), and the University of Pisa (IT).

Speaking after the acquisition of the first successful results, Aubrey Dunne, Co-Founder and Vice President of Engineering at Ubotica Technologies said "We are very excited to be a key part of what is to our knowledge the first ever demonstration of AI applied to Earth Observation data on a flying satellite.

This is a watershed moment both for onboard processing of satellite data, and for the future of AI inference in orbital applications. By working on Pi-sat-1 with ESA and our European partners, we have achieved a breakthrough that demonstrates the real potential of AI for space applications.

This mission is the culmination of over two years of effort by Ubotica, in collaboration with ESA, to characterise and prepare the Myriad 2 device for deployment in space, and to develop Ubotica's AI technology that harnesses this compute to effectively address the opportunities that we have seen demonstrated for the first time ever today. For AI in Space the future is no longer coming - it has arrived".

Max Pastena, Pi-sat-1 Technical Officer at ESA, commented after the confirmed demonstration success "This is a historic milestone in space evolution. The successful application of accelerated AI on-board Pi-sat-1 is a landmark on ESA's technology roadmap and embodies how the Agency is leading disruptive innovation in space".

Josef Aschbacher, Director of Earth Observation Programmes, ESA said "This is a game-changer which puts the European Space Agency at the forefront of space systems development. The excellent news of the successful AI inference performed for the first time in-orbit on a dedicated AI chip onboard Pi-sat-1 couldn't have come at a better time for the agency and our stakeholders, as we open our annual Phi-week conference today, and gives us also the opportunity to recognize the excellence of the European industries in AI based applications and the excellent job done by Ubotica in the development of the AI Myriad-based board for space application".

Gianluca Furano, ESA Data Systems and On-Board Computing Lead, European Space Agency said "Pi-sat-1 is demonstrating how 'ultimate edge' data processing can allow smallsats to achieve much more with the sometimes very limited resources they have. Cloud detection was a low hanging fruit, but our real target is to produce, from raw images, user friendly added-value data that can be directly beamed to consumers. This can be a ground-breaking evolution for small earth observation satellites."

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Ubotica Technologies
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