Using NVIDIA Jetson, Planet achieves AI-powered object detection on its Pelican satellite

Following the announcement of a strategic initiative with NVIDIA, Planet Labs PBC announced a landmark technical achievement: the successful deployment and execution of AI-driven object detection directly onboard its Pelican-4 satellite, paving the way toward on-orbit compute for rapid insights, a capability Planet calls Planetary Intelligence.

On March 25th, 500km over Alice Springs, Australia, Planet’s Pelican-4 captured an image of an airport, then successfully utilized its onboard NVIDIA Jetson Orin module to run an AI model to detect airplanes in moments. This represents one of the first times an Earth imaging satellite has moved beyond simple data capture to onboard AI inference and analysis.

“This success is a glimpse into the future of what we call Planetary Intelligence at scale,” said Kiruthika Devaraj, VP of Avionics & Spacecraft Technology. “By running AI at the edge on the NVIDIA Jetson platform, we can help reduce the time between ‘seeing’ a change on Earth and a customer ‘acting’ on it, while simultaneously minimizing downlink latency and cost. This shift toward integrated AI at the edge is a technological leap that can help differentiate solutions like Planet’s Global Monitoring Service (GMS), providing valuable insights for our customers and enabling rapid response times when it matters most.”

“This step with NVIDIA can help speed the pace of insight, reducing the time to potential answers from hours to minutes. This can be the critical difference-maker for our customers from disaster response to security and beyond,” said Will Marshall, Planet CEO and Co-Founder. “Bigger picture: this is an exciting milestone towards delivering Planetary Intelligence. We’re moving AI from the internet into the physical realm, effectively connecting the ‘eyes’ of our satellites with an onboard ‘brain’ to create a nervous system for the planet.”

This breakthrough can help progress Planet’s Pelican and forthcoming Owl constellations into a near-real-time intelligence network. Leveraging NVIDIA Jetson and high-speed inter-satellite links, Planet is working to effectively close the latency gap. Rather than waiting for data to download and then be analyzed on the ground, customers could receive actionable insights within minutes of capture. The end-to-end process, spanning initial data generation, deep-net object detection, and full geo-rectification, is designed to occur entirely in orbit. By producing GeoTIFF and GeoJSON insights within isolated Docker containers in space, Planet is striving to be able to generate intelligence about events in minutes.

While the onboard models are in their early stages and will continue to be refined, the successful integration of AI applications in space paves the way for a new era of flexibility for satellite constellations. By placing this compute power on the satellite itself, Planet aims to unlock the future of Earth intelligence at a planetary scale with near real-time insights.

Source: BUSINESS WIRE