The presentation took place on 13 March 2019 in the frame of the World Air Traffic Management (ATM) congress, held in Madrid, Spain. More specifically, the European GNSS Agency (GSA) hosted a session related to the European GNSS opportunities in aviation, and the analysis of EGNOS and Galileo benefits for drones was conducted by GeoNumerics.

Castelldefels, 25 March 2019. As experts in positioning and navigation technology, and also due to their expertise in the drone field, GeoNumerics was invited to present an analysis of the contributions of European GNSS systems, namely EGNOS and Galileo, for safe navigation for drones. This matter is of recent and high interest, specially leveraged by the upcoming integration of drones in the traffic management concept in Europe, the so-called U-Space.

On 14 March 2019, GeoNumerics had the opportunity to present its views on the future of drones and GNSS to a Japanese and an EU delegation at the 4th EU-Japan Public and Private GNSS Roundtable Meeting in Tokyo, Japan.

Castelldefels, 18 March 2019. The Cabinet Office (CO) of Japan, and the European Commission (EC) of the European Union (EU) recently organised the 4th EU-Japan Satellite Positioning Public-Private Roundtable on 14 March 2019 in Tokyo, Japan. In the previous two days, the EU mission visited Japanese companies in the field of automotive, agriculture, drone and other GNSS technologies.

The practical organisation of the event was in the hands of CO’s National Space Policy Secretariat (NSPS), that hosted the EU delegation, and of EC’s Directorate-General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs (DG GROW), in cooperation with the European GNSS Agency (GSA). The Cabinet Office also organised the roundtable and, in the previous two days, arranged the site visits and meetings with Japanese companies. The EU mission was composed by EU industry, SMEs and start-ups. Both EU and Japanese companies explored potential business cooperation in the application of GNSS technologies.

GeoNumerics carried final experiments for their MultiTether project within the RAWFIE framework, an Experimentation-as-a-Service project based on road, air, water unmanned platforms integrated in a federated architecture.

Castelldefels, 20 March 2019. Making a drone to (autonomously) follow one ground platform is already quite a task --two drones becomes hence a challenge. This is what GeoNumerics proposed in the MultiTether project, an approach to simultaneous collection of aerial images from two drones and steering only by one ground platform. The tests of the project consisted on a ground unmanned vehicle, equipped with a real-time navigation system and on-board computer, to compute waypoints for each of the two drones, equipped with optical and multispectral sensors. The novelty of the concept stemmed in the integration of both platforms within the federated architecture proposed in RAWFIE. The platforms are then managed by a central controlling entity to fully overview/drive the operation of the respective items. Internet connectivity is extended to the mobile units in order to enable the remote programming (over-the-air), control and data collection. The result is an experiment-as-a-service paradigm, by which experiment reservation, execution, monitoring and data gathering is made as easy as possible.

The Rodovia Raposo Tavares (SP-270, SP, Brazil) has cradled a new mapKITE mapping mission, carried out by ENGEMAP and jointly computed with GeoNumerics: results confirm mapKITE as a cm-level accurate 3D corridor mapping method.

Castelldefels (Spain) and Assis (SP, Brazil), 8 January 2019. ENGEMAP and GeoNumerics have finalized the accuracy evaluation of a mapKITE mission conducted on the SP-270 motorway (Rodovia Raposo Tavares, SP, Brazil) on 25 May 2018. The goal of the evaluation was to confirm the advantages of the mapKITE method and its Kinematic Ground Control Point (KGCP) concept over the “conventional” corridor mapping method in a typical operational mapping scenario. As expected, mapKITE and the conventional method delivered comparable accuracy results the difference being that the latter requires a dense set of surveyed Ground Control Points (GCPs) while mapKITE does the job with almost no GCPs.