LBS

Transformation in autonomous marine operations using robotic arm

Marine-i, the EU funded programme set up to boost marine innovation in Cornwall, has made a grant award to specialist marine technology company, Submarine Technology Ltd (STL). STL has opened a new office in Penryn, Cornwall, UK, to focus on designing and building their futuristic robotic arm, which is a ship-based multi-axis robotic arm for autonomous operations. It will form an integral part of a new Autonomous Synchronised Stabilised Platform (ASSP) to enable intervention tasks to be carried out from Autonomous Surface Vessels (ASV).

Typical intervention tasks will include equipment transfer and payload management, survey and inspection, & launch and recovery. In the future, ASVs will play an important role in the inspection, servicing and repair of offshore wind farms and other renewable energy technologies.

Luokung Technology Corp. announces cooperation with China-LBS

Luokung Technology Corp. a leading interactive location-based services company in China, has announced its strategic partnership with Beidou Navigation and Location Service (Beijing) Limited (“China-LBS”), which is the builder and operator of Beidou Navigation and Location Service Industrial Public Platform. The partnership aims at providing a leading spatial-temporal big data platform service in the area of intelligent transportation to the Company’s users.

China-LBS’ platform has significant data resources in the navigation and locationbased services industry, including aerial images data, satellite images data, digital elevation models, vector topography, geographical names database, navigation electronic maps, nautical charts and navigation channel charts, meteorological and hydrological data, users’ location data of terminals. The platform also has significant shared bicycle tracks, transport and personal vehicle tracks in Beijing area. www.luokung.com

Stanford develops an AI navigation system

Stanford researchers are developing an AI-powered navigation system to direct spaceborne ‘tow trucks’ designed to restart or remove derelict satellites circling aimlessly in graveyard orbits.

There are zones in space, outside Earth’s atmosphere, where old satellites go to die or, rather, to hang out … forever. Too high to burn up in the atmosphere, yet too slow to escape Earth’s gravity, useless satellites are doomed to circle in what are called graveyard orbits.

Stanford professor of aeronautics and astronautics Simone D’Amico hopes to change all that.

His Space Rendezvous Lab (SLAB) is working with the European Space Agency (ESA) to spur development of an artificial intelligence system to direct the orbital equivalent of a tow truck. The two groups are hosting a competition for an AI system that would identify a derelict satellite and, without any input from Earth’s assets, guide a repair vessel to navigate alongside to refuel, repair or remove it.

The software competition is one milestone in a broader research and development program that D’Amico says will feed into his lab’s efforts to develop lowcost navigation systems that future spacecraft will use to maneuver toward distressed satellites or rendezvous with other cooperative satellites.

The navigation system that D’Amico has in mind would be inexpensive, compact and energy-efficient. To spot defunct satellites, the repair vehicle would rely on cameras that take simple gray-scale images, just 500-by-500 pixels, to reduce data storage and processing demand. Barebones processors and AI algorithms that come out of the competition would be integrated directly into the repair satellite. No ground communication would be required. The goal is simplicity: processors and algorithms that require lowresolution images and limited computation to navigate space. stanford.edu

Kontakt.io launches Simon AI

Kontakt.io, location Internet of Things (IoT) Infrastructure provider, has launched Simon AI, the location and sensor analytics software suite for safety and efficiency applications in operational environments. The application platform targets operational users in various verticals: from plant and warehouse managers, operation-, finance-, risk- and human-resource managers, mainly in small and medium-sized companies. getsimon.ai

Mobile mapping solutions by Indoor reality

Indoor Reality has released backpack and handheld indoor mobile mapping systems. The solution consists of two wearable hardware systems for data capture, which share a common SaaS (Software-as-a- Service) pipeline in order to: create feature rich point clouds, and 3D CAD (Revit®) models for BIM and interactively visualize, and virtually navigate inside the photo-realistic 3D models via an intuitive web interface allowing for 3D tagging of objects, and dimension measurements. It also automatically locate assets and people inside buildings (Indoor GPS) indoorreality.com

Aceinna launches INS1000 for guiding autonomous vehicles

Aceinna is offering the INS1000 highperformance dual-band real-time kinematic inertial navigation system (RTK INS) with built-in inertial sensors for construction, agriculture and automotive applications. It has also launched an OpenIMU package for autonomous vehicle guidance and navigation.

Rightware and HERE reimagine the digital automotive user experience

Rightware and HERE Technologies announce the availability of Kanzi Maps, the new map renderer from Rightware, with fresh mapping data from HERE for evaluation and development by joint customers. The solution is available as a Kanzi Maps pre-release from Rightware and under a HERE Open Location Platform (OLP) evaluation license.