Planet Labs announces deployment of AI-driven object detection in space

Planet Labs (PL) announced a technical achievement: the 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 (NVDA) 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, providing valuable insights for our customers and enabling rapid response times when it matters most.”

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