The SmallSat Conference on August 5-10 was a success for Unibap with well received side meeting, where one of the presenting companies was Little Place Labs, represented by their CEO Bosco Lai. In this interview he gives his views on the future of onboard data processing and other insights.

The Unibap Booth at the SmallSat event.

-We provide near real time space time analytics, both for space and ground users. This addresses the gap today with the latency and delay in getting the information downlinked from satellites to the end-users on the ground. Our solutions show the benefit of using data processing in the satellite to only send down the important information. We are active in both commercial and defence use cases, says Bosco.

The story about Little Place Labs began when the founders met at the University at Oxford.

-From the beginning of our journey we were focusing on Machine Learning and AI software for space. Thus we were looking for players with a data processing platform to satisfy our needs. At a very early stage we identified Unibap as a potential partner. They are one of the leaders in building commercial data processing computers for satellites. The most significant moment in our relationship with Unibap was when we did an in-orbit demonstration in December 2022, deployed and ran our software application on the iX5 in Space. The teams worked together seamlessly to ensure a successful deployment from start to finish.

Bosco Lai, Co-Founder and CEO, Little Place Labs.

Beyond presenting at the side event, Bosco and his team also met up with the Unibap team.

-Meeting Søren Pedersen, Mathias Persson and Johan Åman from Unibap was great. It was also a pleasure to present our vision for our company and to show the possibilities and the power of doing edge computing from the end users’ perspective. Our end users are often not familiar to the Space industry, and we have shown how they can benefit from Unibap and Little Place Labs’ solutions.

How did you find the side meeting?

-The whole event was a huge success. Unibap has gathered different companies that together show the potential of the ecosystem. To pool all this together was really great. Edge computing in satellites is no longer a nice to have, but is a must have. You can’t rely on one player to do everything. But in the edge computing ecosystem that we are building together, many companies can bring their unique offerings to the benefit of the end users. And this is just the beginning, the use of Space Technology is really growing and in the future we will see the real power of this nascent ecosystem.

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