AI boosting satellite navigation capability, European Space Agency says

The European Space Agency said Thursday that it is using artificial intelligence for satellite navigation. The engineering teams of the agency's NAVISP program are working with European industry and academics to "invent the future of navigation," it said, resulting in a growing portfolio of services to improve space and Earth weather forecasting, enhance autonomous car and boat performance and help to identify rogue drones in sensitive airspace. The program aims to improve "satnav" performance by combining Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) with AI. "AI comprises all techniques enabling computers to mimic intelligence, whether they be data analysis systems or the embedded intelligence overseeing an autonomous vehicle," Rafael Lucas Rodriguez, the head of the NAVISP Technical Programme Office, said in a statement. A picture taken on February 7, 2020, shows the logo of the European Space Agency (ESA) at its European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, western Germany. "What AI is very good at, through so-called Machine Learning, ML, is extracting meaningful information to identify useful patterns that would otherwise have gone unseen. Satellite navigation is among the fields yielding large amounts of data, so within our sector AI could also serve as the basis of novel approaches and services," he noted.