A write up on Alfs HPM attendance.
I like his bold statement at the end, though we do know what happens when management have made bold statements previously that they haven't quite met....yet.
The other thing, what work is ANT61 Brain doing with Akida that is a secret
How far can the IoT go? Further than you think, as Steve Rogerson discovered at this week’s Hardware Pioneers Max show in London. We will never see a little green man using the self-checkout till at the Mars branch of Walmart to buy a bottle of Romulan ale. Nor will a woman from Venus see […]
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Extending the IoT to Mars
- May 30, 2024
- Steve Rogerson
- Eseye
How far can the IoT go? Further than you think, as Steve Rogerson discovered at this week’s Hardware Pioneers Max show in London.
Alf Kuchenbuch from Brainchip.
This was explained by Alf Kuchenbuch, a vice president at Australian technology company Brainchip (
brainchip.com), who told HPM delegates how excited he was that his company’s chips were now doing real edge processing in space.
“Nasa and the ESA are picking up on AI,” he said. “They want to see AI in space. They are nervous, but they are acting with urgency.”
Earlier this month, he attended a workshop in the Netherlands organised by the ESA where he said the general view was that everything that happened on Earth would happen in space in five years’ time.
“Some find that shocking, but it is an inevitable truth,” he said. “Nasa is picking up on this too.”
But he said even satellites in low Earth orbit sometimes hit latency problems. There are also bandwidth difficulties. Satellites sending constant images of the Earth’s surface use a lot of bandwidth, but many of those images are useless because of cloud cover. Applying AI to the images on the satellite can pick those that show not just the top of clouds, and sometimes they can stitch images together, reducing drastically the amount of data they need to send. And if they are being used, say, to track ships, they don’t need to keep sending pictures of the ship, but just its coordinates.
Taking a leaf from autonomous vehicles on Earth, similar technology can be used for performing docking manoeuvres in space and, as mentioned, controlling ground vehicles on the Moon or Mars. Another application is debris removal. There is a lot of junk circling the Earth and there are plans to remove it by slowing it down so it falls towards Earth and burns up.
“These are why AI in space is so necessary,” said Alf.
Brainchip is using neuromorphic AI on its chips, which Alf said had a big advantage in that it worked in a similar way to a brain, only processing information when an event happened, lowering the power requirements. The firm’s Akida chip is on SpaceX’s Transporter 10 mission, launched in March
“We are waiting for them to turn it on and for it to start doing its work,” he said. He wouldn’t say what that work was just that: “It is secret.”
Brainchip is also working with Frontgrade Gaisler (
www.gaisler.com), a provider of space-grade systems-on-chip, to explore integrating Akida into fault-tolerant, radiation-hardened microprocessors to make space-grade SoCs incorporating AI.
“If this works out, our chip will be going on the Moon landing, or even to Mars,” he said. “Akida is not a dream. It is here today, and it is up there today.”
I was going to end with some joke about the IoT boldly going to the final frontier, but felt the force wouldn’t really be with me, so I didn’t make it so.
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