IoT-based sensing technology in farming

GMV is a privately owned technological business group with an international presence. Founded in 1984, GMV offers its solutions, services and products in very diverse sectors: Aeronautics, Banking and Finances, Space, Defense, Health, Cybersecurity, Intelligent Transportation Systems, Automotive, Telecommunications, and Information Technology for Public Administration and large corporations.

GMV is collaborating in a number of networks related to the domains where it is present, some references are: AMETIC, AUTELSI, FEI, TEDAE, proEspacio, APSCC, SSI.

GMV also supports the GMV Chair (Cátedra GMV) that was initiated in 2004 to lay down the collaboration guidelines between GMV and the Higher Aeronautical Engineering School (Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería Aeronáutica: ETSIA) of the Polytechnic University of Madrid (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid: UPM) for training higher aerospace-system technicians and conducting R&D tasks in this area. Finally, GMV offers internships and organises activities through collaboration agreements signed with numerous educational organisations.

The purpose of the Chair is to drive ETSIA teaching activities and joint R&D by ETSIA and GMV, thus contributing towards their ongoing updates in relation to science, technology and state-of-the-art management methods.

GMV has participated in a number of international projects with the goal of gathering user needs for different topics, in particular GMV led the definition of requirements for the future generation of Copernicus satellites, therefore we have defined a methodology quite mature already that allows us to gather and analyse the user needs.

Our approach is to understand the people who use our service and what they want to do in order to build a service that works for them. To do this, we need to really understand what users are trying to do when they encounter our service and we need to design services that address that context. This involves understanding things that are not ‘in scope’ or part of our responsibility so that we can design better services.

Our user research needs to cover a wide range of users and show that we understand how different user scenarios may impact service design and delivery. We include from the earliest stages users who may need assistance to interact digitally or are unable to interact digitally at all.

The fifteenth Autelsi (Spanish association of Telecommunication users) Award proved the success of the Sensing4Farming initiative. Sensing4Farming represents a new paradigm in the world of smart, digital and precision farming. GMV is acting as technological provider to this initiative in the application of IoT-based field-sensing technology to earth observation for the processing of satellite data and advanced and integrated analysis of Big Databases.

Everything started as a collaboration between Vodafone, Maxar, GMV and Abaco. Each of them is participating contributing with the specific knowledge from their domains. GMV contributes with the processing of the images and the integration of the IoT network. GMV is processing both Copernicus and Maxar data combining it with weather information to provide precision agriculture recommendations.

The solution taps into GMV’s WInEO service for the advanced analysis of geospatial data to support decision-making procedures in farming. Satellite-data analysis technologies integrated with data from several ground sensors provide information on the crop growth of the crops and high added-value agroclimate indices for smart farm management.

GMV is organising face to face meetings with experts from different areas of the Spanish government dealing with the fulfillment of the reporting requested at European Level. The role of GMV in these meetings is to facilitate as much as possible user awareness of the capacities of Copernicus and to leverage between expectations and reality.

On the basis of the specific information needs and requirements of the users, community earth observation-based water information services are recommended, demonstrated and validated. The declared aim of the initiative is to develop earth observation services in collaboration with stakeholders and transfer them to mandated national and regional authorities for operations under their leadership. Such a transfer is long-term process involving R&D activities, capacity building and local adaptations of earth observation services and information systems.

Credit GMV: Automatic Sentinel 2A Forest/Non-forest Mask product. Location, Czech Republic 10/09/2018. Accuracy: 98%.