The push to harness Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in military satellite systems will require greater use of commercial advancements, a panel of experts said Thursday at SATELLITE 2021.
Dr. Santanu Das, the Office of Naval Research’s program manager for Communications and Networking, said the Pentagon is likely five to 10 years away from deploying highly mature AI and ML capabilities for satellite and communication systems. “My office has ongoing research programs that haven’t gone to a higher maturity status yet because we have to work up the confidence to make sure that they give the results that we can really have confidence in.”
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Paul Mattear of Amazon Web Services cited cloud services and edge computing as opportunities for the military to adopt AI/ML applications. “Enabling, through the cloud, AI and ML downrange is what [AWS] is doing in our aerospace and satellite solutions business unit.” He described intelligent routing as leveraging edge computing to most efficiently transfer data across multi-layered satellite networks.
Alvaro Sanchez, CEO of Integrasys, emphasized that AI/ML-enabled sensors must transmit targeted packages of data rather than “a huge amount of information from every sensor.” He concluded: “We need systems as intelligent as possible, as automated as possible, as human-less as possible, because humans tend to make errors. Systems can avoid those errors thanks to artificial intelligence and automation.” VS
