The age of robot pilots has arrived—not for your next commercial flight, thankfully, but for satellites on orbit.
Simulation startup Sedaro, headquartered outside DC, has joined forces with San Diego’s Shield AI to place sat maneuvering capabilities in the hands of AI pilots.
Best of both worlds: The partnership aims to combine the two companies’s technologies—Sedaro’s simulation tools, and Shield AI’s “Hivemind Pilot” software—to give satellites self-awareness and control over their own maneuvers.
Sedaro, which simulates every variable from orbital physics to internal power systems, will act as a training ground for Shield’s AI pilots to test in-space operations. The eventual idea is to house both systems on edge computers aboard defense and commercial satellites to allow sats to game out potential maneuvers and conduct operations without needing to communicate with the ground.
“It’s a very innovative, but low-risk approach,” Sedaro CEO Robbie Robertson told Payload. “Simulation is a tool that we can provide in this newer, less mature domain for [Shield AI] to train their pilots, validate their pilots, and then run alongside them on board vehicles to do that sanity check on any decisions.”
AI revolutions: The partnership comes as the DoD and its allies invest in complex, proliferated defense constellations in response to threats from Russia and China, who are flexing their military muscles in space.
As LEO becomes more contested, satellites are increasingly vulnerable from physical and digital attacks. With an AI pilot, satellites can maneuver without waiting on a connection to the ground, and in denied environments.
In the short term, Sedaro and Shield AI hope their partnership can boost protection of the DoD’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, and future Golden Dome missile defense sats, according to Robertson.
“[The Space Development Agency] built into their architecture…a place for something like this to live, and they have proliferated assets…with a bunch of different functions and payloads that could benefit from being more dynamically tasked,” Robertson said.
In the longer-term however, the joint simulation-and-command software could be used to perform more commercial tasks in orbit, including RPO maneuvers for satellite servicing and refueling.
