Kenneth Östberg presented our poster on GRAIN – Radiation-Tolerant Edge AI at the RISC-V in Space Workshop 2025 earlier this week. The GRAIN line of space computing products includes the newly announced rad-hard GR801 neuromorphic processor based on the BrainChip Akida 1.0 technology. Read...
www.linkedin.com
This poster titled
GRAIN - Radiation-Tolerant Edge AI, presented by Kenneth Östberg, one of its two co-authors (the other being Daniel Andersson), during the “RISC-V in Space” workshop in Gothenburg on Thursday…
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…finally reveals what
NEURAVIS stands for - the name of that R&T project, which ESA awarded to the five consortium partners Airbus Toulouse, Airbus Ottobrunn, BrainChip, Frontgrade Gaisler and Neurobus in mid-2024 (see the July 2024 LinkedIn post by Airbus Space Project Manager Jérémy Lebreton below):
Neuromorphic
Evaluation of
Ultra-low-power
Rad-hard
Acceleration for
Vision
Inferences in
Space.
The poster also provides more information with regards to the use cases currently being explored in the NEURAVIS project, although I’m afraid I couldn’t decipher everything due to the small print - maybe someone with eagle eyes or a magic tool to blow up the photo and unblur the small print can add in resp. correct what I’ve gathered so far:
1. Moon landing
Use Case #1: Vision-Based Navigation for Lunar Lander
Also see Alf Kuchenbuch’s recent comment on Argonaut, ESA’s lunar lander programme:
https://thestockexchange.com.au/threads/brn-discussion-ongoing.1/post-452257
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2. Debris detection/collect (?)
Use Case #2: Monitoring (?) Building Block for In-orbit Maintenance
3. Docking
4. Object ? (looks like “simulation”, but appears to be a longer word?)
In addition, the poster lists four “Application scenarios” for GRAIN’s Radiation-Tolerant Edge AI:
1. Remote Terminal Unit
2. Stand-alone Controller
3. Near-edge processing unit
4. Auxiliary data-processing module
Lots of small print to decipher here as well!
Thank you, BrainChip team, for sharing the news. At Airbus, we are very glad to be starting this new ESA R&T project called NEURAVIS with BrainChip , Neurobus and Frontgrade Gaisler. Our goal is to bring the disruptive technology of neuromorphic computing on an achievable path to the space...
www.linkedin.com
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If I understand the above post correctly, we have yet to hear about what suggestion the NEURAVIS proposal has for AKD1500 (“BrainChip is proud that Airbus selected Akida
for both COTS chips and IP in their proposal.
ESA awarded the Airbus “NEURAVIS” proposal, including Akida in the Akida 1500 chip and on an FPGA together with Frontgrade Gaisler’s NOEL-V processor.”).
Whereas the underlined appears to refer to Frontgrade Gaisler’s newly revealed
GR801 SoC that will incorporate Akida 1.0 IP - greatly benefitting the work of Airbus Toulouse computer vision experts such as Jérémy Lebreton (project lead) and Roland Brochard, as can be inferred from the GRAIN poster’s four listed use cases - there has to be another specific proposal by Airbus how to utilise our COTS chip AKD1500, then.
So I presume Airbus Ottobrunn and Neurobus might be the consortium partners currently collaborating on that second part of the NEURAVIS proposal?
...
