
Articles
Space and Maritime Situational Awareness Dfy Graviti Offers Indigenous Solution
Sub Title : Indigenous solutions for Space and Maritime situational awareness by an Indian Start-up
Issues Details : Vol 16 Issue 4 Sep – Oct 2022
Author : Editoral Team
Page No. : 47
Category : Military Technology
: October 14, 2022

Recent democratization of access to space has proffered both opportunities and challenges. One of the major challenges in maintaining and promulgating the peaceful utilization of space is preventing the militarization of space. Space situational awareness (SSA) is a significant component to monitor and regulate space activities, as per the established international rules and treaties. Burgeoning space sector, unlimited potential benefits from space technology, and defending existing space assets from ever threatening undemocratic neighbors, necessitates an urgent need to expand SSA capabilities in India. Despite relatively early development of space tracking and research facilities and the existence of a significant astrophysics community, SSA capabilities have been virtually non-existent in India. Indian agencies require the knowledge to build a common operating picture of space. The space situational awareness market can be evaluated on the basis of services (Space Weather Services, Near-Earth Object Detection Services, Space Surveillance and Tracking Services), object (mission-related debris, rocket bodies, fragmentation debris, functional spacecraft, non-functional spacecraft), end user (government & military and commercial), and region (North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and RoW). Projected market size of the SSA market is 1.44B USD by 2023 source
Similarly, today, the enemy at sea is often unrecognisable — a terrorist, a pirate, foreign vesseks— an invisible presence that lurks behind regular actors such as fishermen and port workers. Law enforcement agencies today need to be a lot more vigilant, highly reliant on high-grade sensors and communication networks that observe and track suspicious movements, sharing information in real time. Thus arises the need for Maritime Situational Awareness (MSA) for Indian strategic entities. The surveillance and tracking technology segment is expected to have the largest market share and dominate the maritime safety market from 2016 to 2021. End users such as transport and shipping organizations are using advanced surveillance and tracking solutions for better safety and security of the maritime business, which has resulted in the growth of this segment. Maritime Domain Awareness had a market size 23.67B USD by 2021 source
In the Indian market, the software-based MSA and SSA solutions are the ones which are generally procured from Israeli and US vendors. Oftentimes, 90% of the features are not utilized or not useful for the purpose of our agencies. Also, the technical support takes months to update in the software versions. To answer that, our solutions are built along with our agencies’ requirements. Both these fields are ripe for Indian players to come in and develop tailor made solutions for our strategic agencies. While talking to the agencies on the field, we figured out that many of the solutions don’t have multi-sensor fusion. For example, AIS-related data if fused with the current port catalog allows us to actively monitor distance of a vessel from a port of interest. They require all the sensor information fused to build a common operating picture of the Indian ocean region. If Indian companies begin to offer such services, it can be integrated into their services. Ideally, these services can be made available through software deployed inhouse or made available through APIs. Given its space industry background, Dfy has also been involved in proposing specialized solutions for ELINT, COMINT and medium to high resolution Earth Observation strategic payloads.
Dfy Graviti has worked from the requirements engineering with our agencies to build the solution from first principles. This ensures our product will be directly useful for our agencies. Clearly, the product will be at a significant price advantage compared to the ones quoted by non-Indian vendors. With our Situational Awareness Platform solution, our customers will be able to leverage the power of generating insights from spatiotemporal data, be it sea or space, which allows them to react to events proactively. We will provide an easy to use interface to get alerts about anomalous activities happening in the sea. For example, we harness the maritime spatiotemporal data to find out transshipment activities within 15 minutes of receiving the data. Given the size of the problem, we provide a very cost effective tailored solution for our customers.
Space Situational Awareness
DfyGraviti has also developed a unique tool for maneuver detection and payload prediction for Resident Space Objects using Machine Learning application. This was part of our indigenous SSA solution offering validated by a project.
Figure 1 Space Situational Awareness capabilities
The following capabilities are ready to deploy:
- Classification and clustering of objects based on their positions. (e.g. Identication of constellations or functionally similar satellites)
- Maneuver detection: (through supervised and unsupervised methods) and identification of routine and special/anomalous maneuvers
- Payload prediction (using movement patterns and knowledge about objects)
- Detection of malfunctioning, dead on arrival, end of life satellites, debris.
- Increasing accuracy of TLEs through special methods.
- Cesium visualization of special events.
The following are in progress and are to be done in the near future:
- Increasing accuracy of orbital propagation using ML.
- Advanced orbit determination and covariance realism.
- Collision detection and maneuver planning.
- Payload launch alert service.
Maritime Situational Awareness
The MSA Platform is capable of following features and functionalities,
- Anomaly detection using AIS data including Kinematic Anomalies (vessel in close proximity/going too fast), Content Anomalies ( nearby vessel length incompatible with activity), Navigation Anomalies (nearby vessel is breaching forbidden zone).
- Identification of outliers, shipping routes & patterns (Route Extraction & Spoofing Detection).
- Ship detection through satellite imagery
Figure 2 Detection of Spoofing events
DfyGraviti has built a unique AIS data compression scheme which can potentially reduce the size of storage by upto 90%. This unique scheme was also awarded the best paper in best paper award in Information Systems & Information management in the IEEE conference called: 2021 International Conference on Advances in Electrical, Computing, Communication, and Sustainable Technologies (ICAECT). DfyGraviti has also built a unique set of tools for activity detection with inputs from customers which translates to direct advantage over any competition. We have also built models that integrate Synthetic Aperture Radar as an information source.
