Monthly Archives: June 2017

ESNC Special Prizes Searching Secure Services

Reliability is key in countless fields. Especially, the space sector and its multiple application fields are constantly in demand of reliable services and products. These ensure increased security for positioning, navigation and our digital society – and they must be qualified for the harshest environments on Earth and beyond. Galileo together with its exclusive service specifically dedicated to security, Galileo Public Regulated Service (PRS), is the dependable service reaching out to new, ground-breaking applications. Read more…

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Winners of the European Inventor Award 2017 – Radio signals for better satellite navigation

Space-based radio navigation positioning has made significant strides in recent decades. It is now poised to make a greater leap thanks to Galileo, Europe’s global navigation satellite system (GNSS). Signalling technology developed by a team of European engineers not only helps Galileo deliver better accuracy and clear up signal clutter; it also pushes satellite navigation and its features to the next level.

A European team, led by French engineer Laurent Lestarquit and his Spanish colleague José Ángel Ávila Rodríguez and including German Günter Hein and Belgian Lionel Ries, has a unique specialism: sending clear signals from space. A virtual cacophony of radio frequencies is sent down to earth from the more than 50 navigation positioning satellites currently in orbit – including those of the US-led Global Positioning System (GPS), Russia’s Global Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS) and more recently Europe’s Galileo system. This team has helped ensure that signals do not interfere with each other, and that users and developers alike will be able to profit from the next-generation positioning technology that Galileo offers.

The team’s contribution of modulation and spread-spectrum signal technologies forms one of the joint European satellite positioning system’s core components, delivering signals that enhance accuracy, save on satellite power and ensure interoperability with GLONASS and the current GPS and its possible upgrades. Read more…

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Safewayz, your safety app. Winner of Hackathon 2017

After Hackathon 2017, we contacted one of the winners: the “Midnight Coders” team, who developed “Safewayz” app. After exchanging several messages they showed us their interest to publish an article on their succesful application in our website. We thought it was interesting to share with all of you how the idea was conceived and is currently being developed.

By Angelica Ferrer*:
The primary purpose of the app is a safety app that lets someone send an emergency request for police, fire, or ambulance directly into their system bypassing human intervention saving critical minutes in emergency response. A secondary feature of the app is a crowd-sourced safety map that lets users tag/identify safety hazards and ultimately will draw on open source prime data and provide a safe foot path, allow people who are not necessarily driving to avoid trouble. Read more…

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Hackathon 2017 expands Galileo community

This year’s Galileo Hackathon in Gdynia, Poland, brought together students, graduates, entrepreneurs and a handful of helpful high-level GNSS experts to develop innovative LBS applications exploiting the new level of accuracy made possible by Galileo.

As part of its effort to achieve the highest return on European GNSS investment, in terms of benefits to users and economic growth and competitiveness, the GSA has worked very hard to get Galileo into smartphones. It’s an effort that has paid off. Read more…

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Webinar – Galileo and the future of SatNav

Today’s Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) market is huge. Growing demand for precise location information on smartphones and other hardware has seen GNSS technology embedded in 5 billion devices around the world – a figure that is expected to grow to 8 billion by 2020.

In this Webinar, “Galileo and the future of SatNav: drones, smart cities and self-driving cars” (June 13, 5pm CET), the GSA (European Global Navigation Satellite Systems Agency) will review the market – revealing findings from the latest edition of the GSA’s GNSS Market Report – and provide insight on global trends and future developments. In particular, the webinar will explore: Read more…

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Galileo signal team nominated for invention award

The engineering team behind the signal technology underpinning Europe’s Galileo satellite navigation system has reached the final of this year’s European Inventor Award, run by the European Patent Office.

The team is led by Spanish engineer José Ángel Ávila Rodríguez – now part of ESA’s Galileo team – and his French colleague Laurent Lestarquit from France’s CNES space agency.

The team also includes German Günter Hein, formerly head of the department studying the evolution of EGNOS and Galileo for ESA, as well as Belgian Engineer Lionel Ries, now in ESA’s technical directorate, as well as French CNES engineer Jean-Luc Issler. Read more…

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Galileo helps cities mobility company expand

Traffic jams and, more specifically, the pollution, noise and congestion they cause, are one of the greatest mobility challenges that today’s cities face. To overcome this problem, cities across the world are looking at innovative and environmentally sustainable urban mobility solutions that lower CO2 emissions and ease traffic congestion.

In Barcelona, this challenge is being answered in part by MOTIT – a unique, electric scooter sharing service that lets users pick up and drop off vehicles wherever and whenever they want. After reserving a scooter via their smartphone, the user receives a notification showing the location of the assigned vehicle. Read more…

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