The "Eyes of Things" platform developed over three and a half years by a consortium of organizations and companies under the management of the University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM) professor, Óscar Déniz has caught the attention of the European Space Agency. The project has enabled a mobile vision hardware/software open platform to be developed which will be installed in a nanosatellite, which is forecast to be launched into space in June 2019.
The prototype for the mobile vision hardware/software platform designed in the "Eyes of Things" framework, a European project led by the University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM) by means of the research group VISILAB and which was developed between January 2015 and July 2015, will now be sent into space via observation satellites from the European Space Agency in order to provide information about the Earth. This project gathered eight European partners and was funded by Brussels with 3.7 million euros within the framework of the programme, Horizonte 2020.
The platform developed in the project is battery-fed and may be used both independently and embedded in devices which use computer vision, especially those known as wearables, electronic devices which "are worn", toys and robots. The design of the platform is especially outstanding, as it maximizes processing capacity, thereby minimizing energy consumption.
On completion of the project, coordinated by the UCLM Higher Technical School of Industrial Engineering professor, Óscar Déniz, this platform was inserted into a doll and was able to recognize the facial expressions of the person who was playing with it, without needing cloud services; it was also used in a hairband with a small battery to be used as an audio guide in museums. Now, months later, "Eyes of Things" keeps bringing up results, since the Irish company, Ubotica Technologies has shown interest in taking this platform into space.
Ubotica Technologies is one of the companies which is collaborating in the ‘Eyes of Things’ consortium -and which the group VISILAB has a close working relationship with. Ubotica is currently working on a project for the European Space Agency. Sending computer devices into space which provide greater calculation potential in less volume, weight and with less consumption of energy, is among its priorities. This, as professor Óscar Déniz explained, includes the possibility of carrying out processing in space based on artificial intelligence techniques, which could be very helpful for processing the up to 150 terabytes of daily data generated by the earth observation satellites owned by the Agency.
One "highly interesting" application in this field according to Déniz, is to automatically detect clouds in these images, in the same satellite, so it will not be necessary to send all the images captured to earth, which would mean considerable energy savings in the satellite. With the platform designed by "Eyes of things" this is possible since the processing equipment in satellites at present consume approximately 40W and weigh around 25 kilos, whilst the equipment based on "Eyes of Things" would consume 1.5 W and would weigh 200 grammes.
Ubotica is at present carrying out radiation resistance tests on the platform at the European Centre for Nuclear research (-CERN-, Switzerland) "This involves, literally, bombarding the ionizing radiation plate such as that found in space and discovering up to what radiation level calculations are still carried out correctly" explained professor Déniz, who pointed out that these tests are to be done before sending the "Eyes of Things" plate to a nanosatellite which is due to be launched in June 2019.
UCLM Communication Office Ciudad Real, 20th of November 2018.