NAVI-Orbital: First In-Orbit Demonstration of a Zero-Shot Vision-Language Model for Autonomous Earth Observation
As Earth Observation data generation outpaces downlink bandwidth and human-in-the-loop processing, a widening gap has emerged between onboard collection and actionable ground intelligence. This paper presents NAVI-Orbital, a software system deployed on a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) spacecraft. On April 16, 2026, NAVI-Orbital achieved what is, to the authors' knowledge, the first in-orbit demonstration of a vision-language model performing autonomous multi-modal inference entirely onboard. NAVI-Orbital uses a local vision-language model (Gemma 3) to classify each captured scene, produce a text description of its content and the relationships between its features, and respond to operator follow-u...
| Authors | Juan Manuel Delfa Victoria, Taran Cyriac John, Andrew W. Herson |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 5 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 5 June 2026 |
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