Intuidex Inc, a provider of cutting-edge defense software and technology, has teamed with Quub (Mini-Cubes, LLC), a satellite manufacturer, to produce and launch a first-of-its-kind, high functionality, low-cost satellite (picosat) to provide enhanced situational awareness and early warning anomaly detection using sensor data.
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Satellites with this type of sensor functionality have traditionally taken months, if not years, to build and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. In contrast, these next-gen picosats take a matter of days to build with commercially available, off-the-shelf parts with a parts cost of less than $50 thousand. However, it’s their technology that makes them just as functional as their larger and much more expensive cousins. We’ve married two best-of-breed technologies to create something marvelous.
Quub produces best-in-class low-SWaP2 picosats: low-size, low-weight, low-power and low-price. We are able to deploy flocks of picosats with various sensor types including electro-optical, LiDAR and SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) that can stay in orbit for up to five years with little or no debris upon re-entry. But the real game-changer is the on-board technology in processing this sensor data. At Intuidex, we provide the proprietary HO-LRL™ (Higher-Order Low-Resource Learning) technology.
Our technology processes and fuses multiple-source sensor data and quickly identifies objects and events with high accuracy, even in situations where limited data is available for making decisions. This is all edge-based processing on-board the picosats, meaning the object and event detection, fusion and alerting is performed entirely on-board the picosat in milliseconds, resulting in actionable alerts in down-linked systems in near-real-time. This is the very same machine learning technology that’s in Intuidex’s Watchman Analytics™ Suite, a successful analytics platform that has been proven in both the defense and public safety vertical markets.
The upcoming launch is the first-ever picosat of its type to be launched in the United States. According to Dr. Bill Pottenger, CEO for Intuidex, “The first of many, this launch is opening up a new market for space data as a service.