Autonomous driving startup turns its AI expertise to space for automated satellite operation
Hungarian autonomous driving startup AImotive is leveraging its technology to address a different industry and growing need: autonomous satellite operation. AImotive is teaming up with C3S, a supplier of satellite and space-based technologies, to develop a hardware platform for performing AI operations onboard satellites. AImotive's aiWare neural network accelerator will be optimized by C3S for use on satellites, which have a set of operating conditions that in many ways resembles those onboard cars on the road - but with more stringent requirements in terms of power management, and environmental operating hazards.
The goal of the team-up is to have AImotive's technology working on satellites that are actually operational on orbit by the second half of next year. The projected applications of onboard neural network acceleration extend to a number of different functions according to the companies, including telecommunications, Earth imaging and observation, autonomously docking satellites with other spacecraft, deep space mining and more.
While it's true that most satellites operate essentially in an automated fashion already - mean gin they're not generally manually flown at every given moment - true neural network-based onboard AI smarts would provide them with much more autonomy when it comes to performing tasks, like imaging a specific area or looking for specific markers in ground or space-based targets. Also, AImotive and C3S believe that local processing of data has the potential to be a significant game-changer when it comes to the satellite business.
Currently, most of the processing of data collected by satellites is done after the raw information is transmitted to ground stations. That can actually result in a lot of lag time between data collection, and delivery of processed data to customers, particularly when the satellite operator or another go-between is acting as the processor on behalf of the client rather than just delivering raw info (and doing this analysis is also a more lucrative proposition for the data provider, or course).
AImotive's tech could mean that processing happens locally, on the satellite where the information is captured. There's been a big shift towards this kind of computing at the edge' in the ground-based IoT world, and it only makes sense to replicate that in space, for many of the same reasons - including that it reduces time to delivery, meaning more responsive service for paying customers.