On March, 15th 2017, the BCN Drone Center hosted once more an event related with the Horizon2020 project mapKITE. But this time the activity was not related to sub-system testing or laboratory development -something bigger was in place. mapKITE was presented in a workshop that gathered industry specialists from the world-leading mobile mapping integrators (Leica, Trimble, Teledyne-Optech, IGI GmbH), reference European mobile mapping service companies (GeoSAT, TopScan), local cartographic and infrastructure management agencies (Institut Cartogràfic i Geologic de Catalunya, Direcció General d'Infrastructures de Mobilitat Terrestre, Port de Barcelona) and some other stakeholders.

The event resulted in a successful presentation of the main insights behind the revolutionary tandem drone-MMS concept to an audience of around fourty people. Additionally, the European GNSS Agency (GSA) provided the latest insights about the European GNSS systems, EGNOS and Galileo, and its uses for mapping and surveying applications. Finally, Antonio Lira, from Engemap (Brazil), presented the success case of the early-bird implementation of mapKITE in real operations for road mapping in Brazil. The event included a demo, in which the participants could also see the system operating in a real flight, and a round table discussion with the attendees.

On October 25th and 26th the 2016 edition of the Graduate School Course in Geomatics was held at the Aalto University. The topic of this year's edition was “Perspectives of 3D: from georeferencing of mobile measuring systems to registration and interpretation of point clouds”. GeoNumerics is proud to have provided one of the two lecturers, Dr. Ismael Colomina who covered “Trajectory determination for mobile mapping systems”. Adjunct Prof. Boris Jutzi (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany) covered the second day lectures with the topic “Active-optical sensing: state of the art and challenges”.

The Graduate School Course on Geomatics is a prestigious, two-day annual academic event organized since 1998 by Prof. Henrik Haggren and currently also by Prof. Petri Rönnholm. It is attended by Msc and PhD students as well as by geospatial professionals. The course covers the broad range of geomatics disciplines with emphasis on recent results. It is taught by international experts on their respective fields.

The mapKITE consortium is proud to announce the achievement of one of the main milestones of the project: the publication of the first results of a mapKITE system operating in a real corridor mapping mission. These results have been published as an open-access article at the online journal Remote Sensing from the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI), in the frame of the special issue Recent Trends in UAV Remote Sensing.

To access all the materials of the publication, click on this link: http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/9/1/60.

As a follow-up from the previous test campaign, the mapKITE team processed the acquired geo-data to derive orientation and calibration for the aerial images as well as point clouds from the corridor environment. Using ground check points as source for accuracy validation, the results yielded positive conclusions: mapKITE is able to achieve the same accuracy than UAS-only approaches, using the novel Kinematic Ground Control Points (KGCPs) and substantially minimizing the amount of Ground Control Points (GCPs). The current results are in line with previously anticipated results based in simulations.

In June, 20th to 23rd, 2016, the mapKITE project achieved one of its major milestones: the first-time-ever operation of a tandem aerial-terrestrial system conceived for simultaneous geodata acquisition in corridor mapping missions. Such achievement validates the first half of the European Horizon 2020 project, in which an international consortium of ten teams from six different countries have partnered up to turn mapKITE into a reality.

During three days, mapKITE system testing and demonstrations were carried out at the BCN Drone Center, a UAV testing center including 2500 ha of segregated airspace located in Collsuspina, Barcelona. Within its premises, a 2 km rural road was selected as a testing corridor and was operated successfully around ten times. The testing site was prepared with several ground control points measured along the corridor and marked with black and white markers for quality checking.