One of the most remote outposts of the EU, French Guiana in central America, is separated by 15km of shark-infested waters from the former French penal colony of Devil’s Island which featured in the book and film “Papillon” and whose most famous inmate, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, changed the political landscape of France forever.
The former colony made history again on 2 September 2020, this time because the world’s first edge AI enabled satellite, PhiSat-1, took off for Low Earth Orbit (LEO) from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) spaceport Kourou and is set to change the landscape of space exploration forever.
The involvement of Intel and a call out on social media by Bob Swan, CEO of Intel, has generated massive interest in the project with over 2,500 page views and 83k twitter impressions.
The tiny satellite is around the size of a cereal box and is packed with a hyperspectral sensor from Dutch company cosine and an AI engine from Irish SME Ubotica based on the Intel Movidius Myriad 2 SoC.
The original mission of PhiSat was to monitor polar ice and soil moisture but, as we’ll see, the sky’s the limit for AI-enabled applications with Ubotica’s AI engine onboard PhiSat-1 as it whizzes around the Earth at 27,500km/h and at around 530km up in space.
The successful launch and commissioning of the satellite is the result of almost three years of work. This included testing the COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) Myriad 2 device in the CERN LHC/SPS linear accelerator and other radiation testing facilities around Europe to determine its suitability for space applications and its susceptibility to soft errors. Subsequently the launch itself was delayed by over a year by a failed rocket, two natural disasters, and a global pandemic.
According to Dr. Gianluca Furano, the ESA data handling engineer behind PhiSat-1, although it is now common practice to build AI-enabled products for terrestrial use, it had never been done before for space applications, making it an enormous challenge.
“To use AI in a data-critical application is not straightforward even on Earth,” he said. Flying an AI-powered chip like the one onboard PhiSat-1, 329 miles above the surface of the Earth, means that any repair, software patches, or upgrades have to be done via the satellite’s comms uplink.
“Whatever has silicon inside is disturbed by ionizing radiation,” Furano added. This means computer chips that would function perfectly on Earth would have unworkably high error rates, and could even catch fire (due to internal radiation-induced power latch-up) if sent into outer space without shielding or modifications.
But while lots of satellites carry custom-built spaceworthy chips, PhiSat-1 uses Intel’s Myriad 2 chip, a commercially available chip found in DJI drones, Google Clips and surveillance cameras and even Magic Leap’s AR goggles. The space processors typically lag more than a decade behind their commercial counterparts in terms of performance and the gap is widening every year; Myriad 2 provides a sudden performance ‘step’ for in-flight avionics of more than 100x with respect to comparable systems.
Approximately two weeks after launch, the satellite was commissioned and began transmitting its first images back to Earth. The initial application is to filter out clouds, which obscure earth-observation imagery and which can account for 68% of EO imagery on average. Filtering out clouds at source allows precious downlink bandwidth and power to be conserved.
The frontend of the PhiSat-1 imaging system is called HyperScout-2, and, unlike an RGB camera which processes 3 spectral channels, it processes 48 distinct spectral bands from visible light to infrared.
Selecting particular spectral bands to analyze for particular applications makes it possible to see things that no ordinary image would show - for instance the red carotene of drying leaves, which indicates areas at elevated risk of forest fires. Having AI inference onboard opens the prospect of identifying forest fires onboard the satellite by examining the IR bands from the sensor, with consequent reductions in the time to generate alerts for forestry managers.
The imager and associated AI engine are not limited to observing terrestrial areas but can automatically detect algae, oil spills and ships in the oceans and inland waterways. The fact that the platform is programmable allows AI inference networks to be uploaded over the satellite communications channel in a manner familiar to app store users, allowing existing satellites to support a myriad of new applications while in orbit.
This could pave the way for future space-based innovations, from fighting fires and oil spills on Earth, to piloting spacecraft and landers, to driving rovers on Mars.
With a view to the future, Ubotica plans to launch a Myriad X based next generation platform with a space partner in early 2022 as well as a programmed mission to the ISS in 2021.
For any HiPEAC readers interested to get a closer look at this leading-edge technology, check out the HiPEAC Jobs portal for opportunities at Ubotica.
Check out this story and many more in issue 62 of the HiPEAC Info.