Lockheed Martin Space, a division of Lockheed Martin, is headquartered in Littleton, Colorado. Employing over 20,000 people, Lockheed Martin Space is one of the largest aerospace companies in the nation.

The advancements of satellite technology in recent years has assisted Lockheed Martin Space in developing the SmartSat™ software development kit. SmartSat™ enables for the rapid development and deployment of satellite software.

Cameras are a crucial component of satellite systems, and the images they capture can be utilized to run image recognition software. However, these operations can be expensive and time- consuming if not properly optimized, which is quite difficult due to the delicate and complex satellite hardware and software systems.

Our SmartSat™ AI Acceleration in Space system deploys various image recognition software onto SmartSat™ hardware to find the optimal hardware for each model.

Our software targets specific hardware components on a given satellite using hardware accelerators. It enables the resources needed in running models on a satellite to be tracked and minimized. Examples of tracked metrics include, but are not limited to, runtime, throughput, and temperature.

The resulting metrics are visualized in an easy-to-use dashboard so Lockheed Martin engineers can easily view optimal components.

Our software enables efficient deployment of image recognition models onto various satellite hardware components. Through our tool, Lockheed Martin Space can easily cut down on the cost of expensive satellite resources, ensuring they are able to keep making exciting advancements in satellite innovation.

Our AI models are compiled by Vitis AI and ONNX Runtime and deployed onto the Xilinx ZCU102 and NVIDIA Jetson TX2. Benchmarking results are displayed using an AimStack dashboard.