Drones and Galileo to ease rural electrification in developing countries: kicking-off the AMPERE project
The project AMPERE, coordinated by the Italian Free Soft & Tech, had its kick-off meeting to initiate activities regarding the implementation of a drone-based platform for asset monitoring of electric networks, targeting the use case in Republica Dominicana.
Prague, 13 February 2020. Hosted by the European GNSS Agency’s headquarters, a consortium of five European companies and a south American university triggered activities of the AMPERE project. Being its full name “Asset Mapping Platform for Emerging countRies Electrification”, the main goal of the project is to engineer and to start to commercialise a dedicated solution, to be used for electrical power network information gathering. AMPERE will support decision making actors (e.g. institutions and public/ private companies in charge to manage electrical network) to collect all needed info to plan electrical network maintenance and upgrade.
In particular, the need for such a solution comes in emerging countries (worldwide) where, despite global electrification rates are significantly progressing, the access to electricity is still far from being achieved in a reliable way. This is why one of the key partners of the project is the Universidad Nacional Pedro Henriquez Ureña (UNPHU) from Republica Dominicana, that will act as an on-the-field contributor to identifying needs from potential users and setting logistics for the platform tests.