AIRTech

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Company info:

Name: OTA Analytics
Date founded: 2015
Number of employees: 7
Location: Devon, UK

OTA Analytics provide real-time logging and analytics services to enable urban drainage systems to be monitored, maintained, valued and controlled.

www.overtheairanalytics.com

Partners:

Innovation Management Partner:

Artificially Intelligent Rainwater Management Technology

Challenge

In our busy urban settings, frequently, there is either too much or too little water. With changes in our climate, growing urban populations and increased hard surfaces in our cities, we have seen a significant increase in the risk of flooding and sewer spills. Furthermore, ever increasing pressure on water resources and challenges of potable water availability require rapid implementation of water efficiency measures in cities on every continent. Innovative cyber physical technologies are required in order to resolve two of the World’s most costly challenges of our time.

Solution

Rainwater management systems are dual-purpose solutions; providing water efficiency benefits as well as stormwater management services with associated monetary, energy and carbon cost savings for both consumers and utilities. OTA utilised state of the art IoT technologies, which incorporate Predictive Analytics & Artificial Intelligence (AI) with the latest water management and engineering practices. Our vision was to deliver systems that are low-cost, reliable and scalable across global markets. Such systems bring multiple benefits and target a nexus of the challenges facing the water management sector. They provide an ability to capture, store, reuse and release rainwater incident on individual properties and by doing so improve the potable water supply-demand balance and reduce the likelihood of stormwater related flooding and pollution.

FED4SAE Support

In this experiment, we developed a robust, scalable hardware/software system incorporating STM32 platform with Murata’s LoraWAN module into OTA’s middleware, deployed it for testing and validation in the SmartCity Santander testbed as well as case studies in South West England, and used the subsequent data to develop and refine our innovative AI-based control algorithms, in a real-world setting. This was indeed a great success both on the hardware side where prototype systems have been running for over a year successfully, and also the system operation, with optimum operation of tank storage management.

With the business development support from Blumorpho and the Digital Catapult, this experiment has helped us accelerating our solution to market in the EU, building relationship with other suppliers and potential clients, where we can enter as a first mover and realise a significant market share.

Impact

When implemented at scale, our system can help mitigate flooding and sewer spills at some of the most challenging catchments and areas, resulting in significant saving (economic, energy and carbon) alongside climate change adaptation and mitigation. Meanwhile, each system can help reduce demand on dwindling potable water supplies. The market size for both flood mitigation as well as water use efficiency is significant, and the solution can be adapted for application across arid, and wet climates.

Achievements

Beta tested complete solution successfully on Isles of Scilly.
New deployment scheduled for Anglian Water.
Company was acquired by SDS Holdings in early 2020.

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IoT SG

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Company info:

Name: IoT Solutions Group
Date founded: 2018
Number of employees: 8
Location: Watford and Bournemouth, UK

www.iotsg.co.uk

Partners:

Innovation Management Partner:

Driving efficiency and impact through real-time insight

Sensing solutions for 2020 and Beyond

Challenge

As technology advances and lifestyles change, consumer expectations increase. Financial pressures on local authorities and private enterprises continue to rise and the need to improve services to match growing expectations is ever-present.

Trials of IoT devices in the waste management industry indicate significant opportunities for savings of at least 35%. Some research has indicated that up to 87% of public bin collections are wasted, due to low fill rates. Incidents of fires in public bins have resulted in the need for one English council to replace two waste collection vehicles at a cost of £500k.

Traditional methods of delivering fundamental services struggle to provide continuous improvement and new ways must be sought. The potential benefits are clear and sizeable.

Solution

IoT Solutions Group has developed an end to end value chain, comprising sensing devices, edge processing and data dissemination.

We are working to combat the inefficiencies experienced across the waste management industry, improve environmental standards and eliminate instances of asset destruction.

Our devices detect the fill rate of bins, if they have been left open, overturned and potential incidents of fire. By tying up with multiple LPWAN solutions we are able to support the technological requirements of any local authority or waste management company and convert data to usable insight in real-time.

FED4SAE Support

With the support of FED4SAE and by working with Digital Catapult and STMicroelectronics our solution is utilising:

  • STM32F hardware platform
  • LPWAN platform supported by Digital Catapult – deploying SIGFOX and LoRaWAN connectivity

The FED4SAE support has enabled us to accelerate our sensor development and improved the effectiveness of our end to end solutions. The partnership has undoubtedly opened new doors and helped advance our reach into the market.

Impact

Our integrated waste management solutions provide local authorities and waste management operatives with the information they need to streamline collection services, enable emergency response and prevent high value asset write off.

Financial savings and opportunity cost benefits promise to be significant, whilst also enhancing local environments for residents and visitors.

By covering the full value chain, from hardware to insight, and designing bespoke solutions, we are able to provide clients with the insight they need, in the way they need it to address their priorities.

This approach also eliminates end users’ needs to procure the constituent parts of the chain separately, thus driving down the cost to deploy and maintain.

Achievements

Validated 3 communication technologies: Sigfox, LoraWAN and NB IoT.

Demonstrated savings > 50 % related to dynamically optimising bin collection and avoiding full bin events.

Obtained order from the UK’s market leading waste management company.

Safecility

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Company info:

Name: The Convex Lens
Date founded: 2018
Number of employees: 4
Location: Dublin, Ireland

Safecility’s innovative sensor technology enables property owners to easily meet their statutory obligations to test emergency lighting through automation.

www.safecility.com

Partners:

Innovation Management Partner:

Safecility: automated sensor solutions for statutory building compliance testing

Challenge

Every year European businesses and public bodies spend €1bn on inspection of Life Safety Systems in public buildings. Emergency lighting testing is a segment of legally required fire safety testing that at present is conducted manually by technicians who inspect, test and affirm the lighting at a minimum four times per year. This is expensive and time consuming with huge potential for human error and thus non compliance. Smart sensor solutions which automate this testing can free up resources while streaming vital compliance data. This allows building owners to make informed compliance decisions resulting in smarter and safer buildings.

Solution

Safecility digitises the antiquated emergency lighting testing process seen within industry. In Europe emergency lighting testing is carried out in person with results recorded using paper in 90% of cases. Safecility replaces human input with wireless sensors which automate scheduled testing and stream the data to asset managers via a software platform. Building owners can be assured of their compliance status in real time through a simple visual dashboard and audit trail.

FED4SAE Support

Safecility Application Experiment has been implemented using the ST Microcontroller BL072Z and has been validated on the Digital Catapult LoRa testbed infrastructure in London, UK.

Impact

Safecility has automated and digitally recorded legally required emergency lighting testing while minimising the cost and time involved in maintaining compliance. By developing and validating this type of sensor technology using LoRa, Safecility was able to prove the future potential of a wide range of applications which would tackle additional statutory building compliance testing in smart cities.

Safecility has and continues to take strides towards a more transparent and accountable system for fire safety testing in the wake of the Grenfell Tower tragedy. Human error or failures will be drastically reduced resulting in safer buildings and safer residents.

Achievements

Successful trial with Vivid Homes and Limerick Council.

Received Competitive Start Fund Grant from Enterprise Ireland in 2019.

Shortlisted by Lighting Industry Association for the Lux Awards 2020 Emergency Lighting Product of the Year.

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Sentinal

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Company info:

Name: Sentinum UG
Date founded: 2018
Number of employees: 3
Location: Nuremberg, Germany

Sentinum specializes in the implementation of large-scale wireless sensor networks for municipal use. Starting with the hardware, over the wireless communication up to data storage, evaluation and visualization.

www.sentinum.de

Partners:

Innovation Management Partner:

An energy-self-sufficient drainage monitoring system for critical event detection

Challenge

Rapid flooding of drainage systems is a well-known but hard to predict consequence of heavy rain that occurs in many climates around the world. The resulting high flow rate and pressure in the duct system can lead to considerable damage to the substance or even worse to detached manhole covers which pose a danger to pedestrians and traffic participants.

Solution

Only with a holistic sensor system an accurate picture of the events in the canal is generated and damage to infrastructure and people can be prevented. By recording the water level, flow rate and pressure, conclusions can be drawn in real time about events in the drainage system. We also record the position of the manhole cover and the presence of harmful gases such as H2S to protect people in the vicinity. The sensor is completely energy self-sufficient and wireless. The communication uses the latest LPWAN technologies. All data is stored by our cloud services and visualized for the customer.

FED4SAE Support

In the implementation of our product, we benefit especially from the partners provided to us via FED4SAE. Our energy self-sufficient sensors require low-power microcontrollers which nevertheless possess a certain performance. For this we use the STM32L4. With its extremely low power consumption in sleep modes it is predestined for our application. Via FED4SAE we have direct contact to ST-Microelectronics and can access this resource and expertise first hand. With the Fraunhofer IISB as test bed, we simulate the harsh environmental conditions prevailing in a sewer system and analyze its effects in a unique way. Being able to fall back on such practical tests during product development accelerates time-to-market extremely and increases the quality of our final product.

Impact

Our system affects two different areas. On the one hand, there are hardly any possibilities for planning offices and municipal civil engineering departments to evaluate how their sewer system works. With our system, data is continuously recorded over many years and processed to provide information about changes and anomalies. This opens up a completely new perspective on the planning phase, implementation and, above all, maintenance of the sewer systems.

The second point is increased safety for pedestrians and traffic participants. Injuries and even fatal accidents due to missing manhole covers occur more frequently than they should. Accidents or even drowning due to the tremendous suction of the backflowing water during heavy rain events. With our sensor system, depositioned manhole covers are instantly detected and warnings are transmitted to the relevant authorities, by voice call, sms or email. With this information, communities can act quickly and avoid resulting threats to people and the environment.

Smart-Tunnel

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Company info:

Name: ISSD
Date founded: 2009
Number of employees: 51
Location: Ankara, Turkey

ISSD is working on system design and integration, digital signal processing, software development and electronic design. The company provides solutions for Intelligent Transportation Systems, Traffic Management and Enforcement Systems.

www.issd.com.tr

Partners:

Innovation Management Partner:

Smart-Tunnel: Improving automatic incident detection in tunnels

Challenge

In many road tunnels worldwide, human operators monitor the flow of traffic through CCTV cameras from a central control room to ensure the users’ safety. However, scrutinizing large numbers of monitors over extended periods of time is a cognitive challenge. Automatic Incident Detection (AID) systems help by analysing multiple video streams in real time and automatically alerting operators to events which they may need to act upon. Current AID systems utilize traditional computer vision image processing algorithms, which are subject to performance limitations inherent to their functional principle.

Solution

Artificial neural networks can outperform traditional approaches in computer vision. Therefore, ISSD has augmented their AID solution with deep learning to increase detection accuracy and performance. Specialized hardware for the neural network inference process keeps the server cost competitive. The solution can be deployed to both new and – as a retrofit – to existing tunnel monitoring infrastructure.

Achievements

ISSD has created a deep-learning based detection engine for their AID product that generates real-time alerts when pedestrians or a stationary vehicles appear in a video stream. After outperforming the previous solution against a representative set of video segments recorded in several road tunnels, the new detection engine was integrated into a live AID installation for evaluation at one of ISSD’s customers in Turkey.

In this test, the false alarm rate was reduced about half from the legacy solution, with the new engine still detecting all the events that the legacy engine detected, and doing so faster. The deployment environment for the detection engine employs Intel Movidius Myriad X visual processing units (VPU) in a highly scaled high-density deep learning (HDDL) configuration, processing camera video at a lower hardware cost per stream than the previous platform despite the increased computational requirements.

FED4SAE Support

Intel benchmarked the solution across multiple hardware platforms (CPU, FPGA, VPU) to confirm ISSD’s selection, provided performance tuning support of the network and assistance on the server configuration using the HDDL boards. Leading the technical coaching on neural networks, fortiss supported ISSD in applying the Neural Network Dependability Kit (NNDK) and in interpreting its analysis results to evaluate the object detection network model and improve its robustness against various kinds of image noise.

Blumorpho provided business innovation coaching and pitch training. Several joint dissemination and networking opportunities were enabled by all the partners.

Impact

  • After its maturity for production use is ensured, the improved detection engine will be an integral part of ISSD’s tunnel safety product.
  • The new technology will also be applied to other traffic monitoring products in ISSD’s portfolio.
  • Intel will partner with ISSD to assist them in scaling their portfolio of intelligent traffic management solutions to the global market, improving traffic safety worldwide.

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