Ubotica has revealed a new milestone in Live Earth Intelligence with the firm’s CogniSAT-6 satellite mission: successful onboard AI detection of objects on Earth and immediate relay of insights to users on the ground — this marks the world’s first commercial deployment of Live Earth Intelligence, setting a new standard for real-time space-based insights.
Earth has an observation problem. Today’s EO satellites don’t understand what they’re observing; they simply gather data and downlink it all for delayed on-ground processing. EO today is slow, expensive, and overly complex.
Ubotica’s CogniSAT-6 mission, launched in partnership with Open Cosmos in March this year, changes this paradigm. Powered by Ubotica’s SPACE:AI platform, it revolutionizes EO by enabling satellites to understand what they see and to deliver affordable, real-time and actionable insights crucial for economic growth, climate monitoring, and global security.
CogniSAT-6 recently captured an image over Khor Fakkan, UAE, and within minutes, SPACE:AI identified 142 ships outside the port at an impressive rate of 21.3 km² of image data processed per second. 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 ground.
Another observation was of Galveston, Texas, USA, which is the gateway to Houston. Again in seconds, SPACE:AI identified 37 ships entering the channel and instantly relayed insights to ground.
The Ubotica team pioneered a sophisticated synthesis flow, creating realistic image training sets that precisely simulated the CogniSAT-6 imager’s output. This advanced approach enabled our algorithms to generate accurate insights from the very first images captured in orbit, demonstrating Ubotica’s leading-edge expertise in space technology.
SPACE:AI not only identifies vessels but also extracts valuable metadata, including location, size, and orientation. This metadata, relayed to ground in real-time, can then be combined with AIS (Automatic Identification System) data to detect potentially “dark” ships engaged in illegal or suspicious activities.
Ship detection is just one EO application of SPACE:AI. The platform supports hundreds or even thousands of different Earth Observation applications by making it easy for developers to train, test, and deploy different models for their specific use cases. In the examples above, SPACE:AI 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.
“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. The CogniSAT-6 mission is the first to achieve Live Earth Intelligence, revolutionizing the capabilities and cost-efficiency of Earth Observation”, said Fintan Buckley, CEO of Ubotica.