Talking with Flavia Tata Nardini is a reminder that there’s more to the Internet than Facebook or Twitter or online gaming. Her company, Fleet Space, is focused on Internet of Things devices that communicate through a fleet of nanosatellites in low Earth orbit (LEO).
The Internet of (remote) Things
SpaceQ readers will have heard of IoT referring to things like home appliances or autonomous vehicles, ones using existing Internet infrastructure. Tata Nardini has a different vision of IoT. In an interview with SpaceQ, Tata Nardini explained that the true opportunities for the IoT lie in remote locations in countries like Australia — Fleet’s home —and in Canada. Energy companies, and other resource companies, need to monitor things like pipelines and electrical lines, and other pieces of remote infrastructure where sending humans — or even drones — would be difficult and expensive.
Companies can easily create and place monitoring devices, but the real challenge is getting data from remote, far-flung locations. Nardini explained that observation drones and satellites (like the SAR constellations in SpaceQ’s SAR roundup) can’t directly measure and produce data like pipeline flow and line voltages. Traditional satellite uplinks to geosynchronous communication satellites require large antennas and a lot of power, which is often infeasible on the scale needed for infrastructure. Relying on cellular data is expensive and often not available.
Fleet Space’s two-part solution, called the Nebula System, pairs together a constellation of LEO communication satellites and dozens of small ground stations called “Fleet Portals” connected to infrastructure sensors in remote locations. The sensors gather data, the portals use machine learning to identify what’s notable, send that information to the satellites, which in turn pass the info along to Fleet’s clients. Five Fleet satellites are in orbit now, with Fleet having ambitious plans to eventually build a constellation of 140 satellites that can connect with each Portal every few minutes.
The Nebula System: long distance, small size
The satellites and Portals are both very, very small. Fleet Space’s satellites are all nanosatellites; they weigh less than 10 kg apiece and are “the size of a shoebox.” The Portals are small, pole-mounted devices. Fleet put a lot of work into both.
The satellites are made to conserve space and energy, using small onboard computers with machine learning capabilities, and a custom-made 3D printed phased-array antenna using digital beamforming controlled by field-programmable gate array’s (FPGA). Nardini explained that although the side of a nanosatellite is “very tiny” (10cm by 30cm) Fleet Space was able to corrugate the metal antennas by creating them using 3D printing, creating a complex surface that “optimizes the surface of the antenna” and can “send as much as a 100kg satellite in a 10kg satellite” — a full terabyte of data over the course of the satellite’s five year lifespan.
The lead for the team that created the antenna, Yan Brand, has been with Fleet since 2019 and is actually based out of Montreal. Despite the challenges of long distance telework and time zone differences, Brand and his team were able to work together to make it “as robust and as low profile as possible.” Tata Nardini said that “every millimetre counts”, and Brand elaborated that they needed to “obtain a wide beam scanning in azimuth and maintain good RF performances” within that small space. It took them a lot of time and money to create the 3D-printed corrugated antenna to “be as close as possible to a half wavelength spacing between the elements,” but it’s now paid off.
The Fleet Portals are also much smaller than both traditional antennas and the pizza-box-sized phased array antennas used by services like Starlink. Nardini explained that they were able to do this using the LoRaWAN specification (Low Power, Wide Area Networking), which uses long range, low power Chirp Spread Spectrum tech that lets them trade throughput for distance. Each Portal uses an Edge server (along with proprietary machine learning algorithms) to aggregate and compress any significant data from local sensors, leaving a comparatively small amount of data to send to the Fleet satellites. They use LoRaWAN to send it all the way up to Fleet’s satellites in LEO. The use of LoRaWAN also means that power usage is minimal.
Fleet Space’s growing business
The business world has taken notice. Fleet had raised $11.1M over two Series A funding rounds, one led by Switzerland’s Momenta Ventures and one by Hong Kong-based Horizon Ventures. They’ve already started working with companies around the world on securing and monitoring their infrastructure. They announced that they would be working with SEA Gas to monitor over 700 km of pipelines in South Australia, and Nardini said that they’re working with Canadian energy and resource companies Canadian companies, though she couldn’t provide details due to NDA restrictions. And Fleet has competitors, including China’s Beijing Guodian High-tech Co, US-based Swarm Technologies, Canada’s Kepler Communications, and even fellow Australians Myriota have also moved into the remote IoT space.
As one of Australia’s earliest and most notable space startups, they’re building the local scene. Fleet is investing in Quasar, a new Australian firm that is adapting Fleet’s phased array antenna technology for ground stations, and Nardini said “can you imagine how incredible it is when the satellites can see a lot of things, and the ground stations can see a lot of things? You can do everything with beamforming technologies!” She also spoke on the Seven Sisters mission, which is a consortium that will be focused on Moon exploration, and will take Fleet’s technology and use it to track lunar seismic activity. And they’re also applying for an MMI grant to bring the manufacturing process entirely to Australia, helping to reinforce the progress that’s already been made in that country’s space sector.
All this shows how companies like Fleet are showing that the most important technology we have may involve devices that we never, ever see, as the Internet continues to become the ubiquitous background of 21st century business.