Japan's NEC collaborates with Lockheed Martin in space, aviation field

By 2024, the spacecraft "Orion" developed by Lockheed Martin will bring humans to the moon in NASA's Artemis program. The system invariant analysis technology, one of NEC's Artificial Intelligence technologies, will perform checks to ensure that the spacecraft is tested and operating properly during the production phase.

Kevin Woodward, Space Senior Manager for AI/Machine Learning, said, "Right now our focus has been on the assembly test launch operations, and some of that includes the space environment tests and we can realize how that spacecraft will function in the environment. Exquisitely this wonderful holistic view of the system and an understanding that we have not been able to analyze or view in this way in the past. If you were to ask a human to do that same task, one person, it would take them 240 years. Artificial Intelligence does it very quickly within an hour."

Moto Sato, NEC Laboratories America while speaking on the collaboration said that NEC is very focused on how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can explain the result. "So we are pretty much focused on the experience AI or we call the white box AI that help not only the data scientist but also the expert to understand what the result how the results come from the AI. So we as an NEC, we are not only enhancing the technology from the accuracy or performance point of view to get the trust from the human."

"And so SIAT (Technology from NEC) is providing ways to assist human engineers in determining if the behavior was proper or not really critical to crew safety and to the operation of the vehicle. Every disaster that's occurred in aerospace and in spacecraft has been with missed data. We see that as a core mission because there is a crew life at stake here," added Steve Jolly, Lockheed Martin Space.

Kevin Woodward, Space Senior Manager for AI Machine Learning, also commented on the capabilities of the AI saying, "There's a great portfolio show of AI capabilities that NEC has developed, and also mentioned that NEC has a great understanding of the environment in which we operate since they too operate in the space environment."

Moto Sato, NEC Laboratories America, said, "We need to build the AI in much higher security robustness and also feel the comfort that AI provides. And they know that people's rights mean that they record privacy protection. NEC continues developing AI solutions based on not only the high performance but also high security, robustness, and fairness. NEC and Lockheed Martin are developing new space technology through artificial intelligence.