Ubotica claims further breakthroughs in live Earth satellite intelligence

Space:AI technology provider Ubotica is hailing a significant milestone in Live Earth Intelligence as part of its CogniSAT-6 satellite mission, with the successful onboarding of artificial intelligence-based detection of objects on Earth and immediate relay of insights to users on the ground.

It claims the move marks the world’s first commercial deployment of Live Earth Intelligence, setting a new standard for real-time space-based insights.

Ubotica believes the launch addresses the challenge of traditional Earth observation (EO), whereby EO satellites don’t understand what they’re observing. They simply gather data and downlink it all for delayed on-ground processing, making current EO slow, expensive and overly complex. Ubotica says its CogniSAT-6 satellite mission changes this.

Launched in partnership with Open Cosmos in March 2024, and powered by Ubotica’s Space:AI platform, CogniSAT-6 is attributed with “revolutionising” EO by enabling satellites to understand what they see and deliver affordable, real-time, actionable insights crucial for economic growth, climate monitoring and global security.

Space:AI not only identifies objects, but also extracts valuable metadata, including location, size and orientation. This metadata, relayed to the ground in real time, can then be combined with Automatic Identification System data to detect anomalies.

A key EO use case for Space:AI is ship detection, whereby it could detect illegal bilge or oil discharges from ships or assess the health of marine habitats, such as early detection of algal blooms that can impact marine ecosystems and human activities. The platform is also said to support hundreds, even thousands, of different applications by making it easy for developers to train, test and deploy different models for their specific circumstances.

Yet Ubotica stresses that Space:AI is more than just image capture and processing and is about unlocking valuable, real-time insights hidden within EO data. It believes its technology is revolutionising the industry, making EO faster, more affordable and more actionable.

Rather than today’s methods that wait until a satellite passes over a downlink ground station to transmit images, which can delay insights by days, CogniSAT-6 uses a real-time inter-satellite communications network to immediately relay insights to the ground.

In a recent application, CogniSAT-6 captured an image over Khor Fakkan in the United Arab Emirates, and Space:AI identified 142 ships outside the port within minutes by processing 21.3km² of image data per second. Another observation was above Galveston in Texas, the gateway to Houston. Again in seconds, Space:AI identified 37 ships entering the channel and instantly relayed insights to the ground.

“This is a paradigm shift for Earth observation. The industry has long sought a model of Live Earth Intelligence, where insights are generated onboard satellite and instantly relayed to ground,” said Ubotica CEO Fintan Buckley. “The CogniSAT-6 mission is the first to achieve Live Earth Intelligence, revolutionising the capabilities and cost-efficiency of Earth observation.”