Noordwijk/Oberpfaffenhofen, 21 May 2014: After one week of intense teamwork at the European Space Agency’s ESTEC and ESA BIC Noordwijk facilities in the Netherlands, the 20 developers from 11 countries participating in the Space App Camp presented their apps to the other participants and a jury of representatives from ESA, the European Commission, and the project’s consortium.
From the five teams working on apps in predefined categories – Agriculture, Environmental Protection, Maritime Environment and Maritime Transportation, and Lifestyle apps – the latter selected FieldSense as the winning app.
From 4-12 May 2014, the EU-funded project S2G2M2 invited 20 developers to take part in the Space App Camp, which was organised by Anwendungszentrum GmbH Oberpfaffenhofen. The participants had the chance to work with like-minded people, learn how to integrate satellite data into their mobile applications, and gain insight into Europe’s space programmes. The aim of the Space App Camp itself, meanwhile, was to encourage the development of working app prototypes that integrate Galileo/EGNOS and Copernicus data.
FieldSense: helping farmers visualise up-to-date crop health data
This app is being developed by Brian Frølund, John Nielsen, Manuel Ciosici, and Mikkel Kringelbach, four computer science students from Aarhus University (Denmark).
"Joining the Space App Camp and seeing the opportunities satellite data affords in mobile applications was inspirational," the team stated. "Winning the competition is a validation of our idea. Receiving the innovation voucher along with attending the EBN congress will help us to develop a product that augments farmer productivity."
FieldSense handles the complexity of retrieving data from space by processing and interpreting it. The app provides easily understandable information that integrates into farms’ existing workflows. This will allow farmers to better prioritise the time they spend on oversight and precise spatial evaluation of their crop treatments.
In the other team categories, the following app concepts were developed:
enviQ – air quality information for all
The idea behind this app is to make air pollution information accessible to anyone who cares about healthy living. enviQ makes getting daily air quality ratings as easy as checking the temperature. Its team consisted of Danny Preussler and Johannes Orgis, lifestyle mobile developers at Groupon/6Wunderkinder (Germany); and Adam Wlodarkiewicz and Krzysztof Stopa, software developers at the Space Research Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
safe.HUD – augmented-reality heads-up-display for unmanned aerial systems
Safe.HUD is an iOS/iPad application developed for the Parrot ar.drone. It provides an augmented-reality HUD for unmanned aerial systems (UAS) that gives UAS pilots enhanced safety features for situational awareness. Here, it incorporates space data from the Copernicus satellite missions and uses the Galileo satellites (EGNOS) for higher-precision GPS localisation.
The safe.HUD team is composed of Evangelos Georgiou, a professional iOS and Android developer and a PhD student of robotics from King’s College London; Erik Unger, an aviation enthusiast and a 3D graphics and software developer from Austria; Jip van Akker, an aviation enthusiast and a professional iOS developer from the Netherlands; and Vladimir Veta, a professional iOS and Android developer from Macedonia.
Sapelli – a data collection and sharing platform for illiterate users
Sapelli aims to provide indigenous people with tools that empower them to take action to protect their local environment and way of life. However, it remains a major challenge to communicate the higher concept of participatory mapping to people who have no prior experience with digital technology or maps. Therefore, the idea behind Sapelli involves prompting true-colour, high-resolution satellite images overlaid with the user’s viewpoint to confirm and verify choices, thereby improving spatial understanding of the land.
Michalis Vitos and Julia Altenbuchner, both PhD students at the research group ExCiteS at University College London (UCL), teamed up with Dimitrios Ververidis and George Liaros from the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH) in Greece.
Sea Care – grassroots reporting of illegal fishing
Sea Care is a platform that lets our citizens at sea volunteer to help solve the universal problem of illegal unreported fishing. It makes smartphones the principal reporting tool and engages the community on a grassroots level to let them become a part of the solution.
The team behind Sea Care consists of four multi-disciplinary engineers working at Prodevelop (Spain): Daniel Gaston, Alberto Romeu, Jorge Sanz, and Vicente Sanjaime. They have backgrounds in computer science, cartography, and telecommunications, as well as broad experience in creating added-value geospatial applications for the marine sector.
Those interested to participate in the next App Camp are invited to pre-register now. It will take place from 8-15 September 2014 at the European Space Agency’s ESRIN facilities near Rome.
Further information on the Space App Camp is available at www.app-camp.eu.