Status Update on Laser Communication Activities in NICT

National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) has initiated several R&D projects related to satellite laser communications. In this paper we present some of the recent activities in the field, including the development of the optical ground station for geostationary orbit satellite-to-ground optical feeder link experiments with High-speed Communication with Advanced Laser Instrument (HICALI) and the optical bench preliminary experiment results with stars, planets and international collaboration with the OSIRIS payload from the German Aerospace Center (DLR). Furthermore, we present two main fields for future research - deep learning implementation for cloud recognition for site-diversity technology, and space optical communications with Cubesats.