GeoNumerics is proud to announce the successful completion of the H2020 project “mapKITE: EGNOS-GPS/GALILEO-based high-resolution terrestrial-aerial sensing system” on April, 26th, 2017. On that day, the final review meeting was held at the European GNSS Agency (GSA) headquarters in Prague, Czech Republic, in which the project consortium explained the last results and experiences from the latest test campaign, and the administrative aspects of the project were closed.

The first objective of mapKITE project was to build a mature EGNSS enabled prototype of a novel tandem terrestrial-aerial mapping system based on a terrestrial vehicle (TV) and on an unmanned aircraft (UA), both equipped with remote sensing payloads. The final product is high resolution, oriented, calibrated and integrated images of a corridor and its environment. The second objective was to demonstrate services; i.e., the technical/commercial feasibility of the concept. And finally, the third objective is to develop the market including contracts or negotiations in place so the prototype can be used in operational conditions.

The 7th international and 1st Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) edition of the course “Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry” took place from 20th to the 29th of March of 2017 at Dubai. Twenty-four participants of various countries and backgrounds, from government, industry and academia, attended the lectures and the practical exercises that were distributed into two modules: “Integrating drones into geomatics: principles and applications” and “UAV remote sensing mission planning, operations, data processing and project management.”

The course belongs to the broader capacity building initiative “Drones for Geomatics” of the Arabian Gulf University (AGU), was organized by the AGU and the BCN Drone Center and hosted by the International Center for Biosaline Agriculture (Academic City, Dubai, UAE).

GeoNumerics is proud to announce that it has been granted a SME project (phase I) called M2M “mapKITE to market” on the specific call  'SMEInst-04-2016-2017' under the grant agreement number 762692.

The goal of M2M is to conduct a market analysis to introduce mapKITE into the market. MapKITE is a new mobile tandem, terrestrial and aerial, geodata acquisition and orientation/calibration system and method that combines an aerial unmanned (drone) and a land mobile mapping system. In a mapKITE mission, the mapping drone follows the mapping land vehicle by means of a stream of waypoints generated in the vehicle and transmitted to the drone. The land vehicle carries metric targets to materialize accurate kinematic ground control points. In the mission, inertial, GNSS, odometric and imaging data are recorded. In post-processing, these data are combined in a new way for accurate georeferencing purposes.

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.