Today there are 110M landmines in the ground in 78 countries including in Europe, killing between 15,000 -20,000 a year. The removal of landmines is slow (deminers using metal detectors must clear heavily mined sections manually), dangerous (for every 5000 mines cleared 1 worker is killed and 2 injured), and costly ($300–1000 to remove 1 mine). Currently there is no way to rapidly detect landmines over a large area of land. Deminers must go meter by meter and manually detect and then remove the mines. This takes huge amounts of time and means having to cover areas that do not have mines. In the past 5 years less than 1000 km2 worldwide were cleared of mines. If demining continue at the current pace it will take 1100yrs to remove all the landmines. To meet the need for a fast way to detect landmines we created the Anti-Landmine Drone (ALDrone) a small, lightweight drone that detects landmines using a multispectral camera to spot the erosion created by the decomposition of the chemical elements in a mine. The advantages of an aerial detection system are higher speeds, our system can cover the same area in 1 day that other landmine detection methods take a month to cover, and an off-site central control station meaning no chance of explosion while locating mines. Our solution is also competitively prices to make it available to as many people as possible. Thanks to the Mine Ban Treaty countries worldwide have committed to eliminating all the mines in the world. In 2013 the EU contributed over 2M€ to demining activities, international support amounted to almost $435M and national support almost $198M. While are target market is clearly a niche market our total addressable market is significant. And while the demand for a product like ALDrone is very specific we already have interest from the Bosnia-Herzegovina Mine Action entre which leads us to believe that there is indeed a market and a demand for our product in the humanitarian demining sector.

Satellite-based PNT is a fundamental infrastructure of the EU. Its protection and improvement are strategic, as other infrastructures – e.g., communications, energy, transport, defence or banking – depend on it. However, signals of current GNSSs are easily jammed, prone to spoofing, subject to atmospheric disturbances, affected by multipath and blockage in natural and urban canyons. This poses global risks and hinders GNSS adoption in mission- and safety-critical tasks, e.g., drone delivery, urban air mobility or autonomous vehicles. Aware of that, civilian and military authorities are promoting/deploying complementary or redundant systems, a.k.a. "augmentations”, local – e.g. aiding inertial sensors – or global – e.g., Galileo’s NMA. However, effective augmentations, local or global, that are robust, accurate and driftless are expensive. To this end, the project EGeNiouSS will develop a cloud service based on novel multi-sensor navigation with a tightly integrated visual localisation component to overcome known GNSS issues and augment existing EGNSS services. EGeNiouSS will bring an affordable, accurate and assured positioning, navigation and timing (AAA-PNT) solution to the market in order to democratise the access to high accuracy and reliability and thus serving the professional and consumer mass markets. The service will be accessible through a platform-independent API. During the project, the API will be integrated for smartphones and drones. With three complementary use cases, Mapping & Surveying, Bike Navigation and Drone Delivery, the entire range of the service with respect to accuracy, latency and reliability requirements will be demonstrated and validated. The development will be accompanied and driven by user and stakeholder requirements and innovative DEC measures to ensure a rapid market update. As a scalable and highly adaptive service it is easily transferable to other applications and markets, e.g. LBS, autonomous vehicles or search & rescue.

The first objective is to build a mature 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 UA will follow the TV at a constant flying height above ground while geodata are acquired simultaneously from the TV and the UA. The final product is high resolution, oriented, calibrated and integrated images of a corridor and its environment. The second objective is to demonstrate services; i.e., the technical/commercial feasibility of the concept. The third objective is to develop the market: at the end of the project, contracts or negotiations shall be in place so the prototype can be used in operational conditions. MapKITE targets corridor mapping. It is a terrestrial-aerial surveying system that combines the advantages of the terrestrial and airborne (manned or unmanned) ones. It responds to corridor mapping market needs only fulfilled by much more expensive separate terrestrial and aerial missions. An enabling component is the navigation payload based on EGNOS and the E5 AltBOC Galileo signal, superior to existing/planned GPS signals and of particular interest for robustness/integrity. An octocopter of UAVision will be modified and equipped with the avoidance collision system of CATUAV. Due to the low weight of the UA (less than 5 kg), to its low flying altitude (range between 30 m and maximum allowed height) and to its inbuilt line of sight [TV to UA] keeping feature, mapKITE does not suffer from the regulations affecting UAS civilian use. Its design is dominated by safety and abidance to current and foreseeable rules for small UA. Unrestricted testing will be conducted in a segregated airspace area that has been recently awarded by the Spanish aviation authorities. MapKITE is highly innovative: new surveying paradigms, new mathematical models, new ways of fusing sensors and a new “map” product. It is protected by the Spanish patent 2012312