The TREASURE project

FAST FACTS

TREASURE kicked off in February 2017 and its coordinated research sub-projects started between June and September 2017 after the recruitment of its 13 research fellows, each in charge of an individual sub-project.

TREASURE focuses on the emerging area of European GNSS (EGNSS). Collectively, GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite Systems) includes systems such as the wellestablished US Global Positioning System (GPS) and the Russian GLONASS, as well as the new, under development systems like China’s Beidou and most importantly Europe’s Galileo.

Galileo is what we call EGNSS and is to be fully operational in 2020. GNSS have a multi-billion Euro worldwide industry – the EC has predicted an annual global market for GNSS of €300bn by 2020. However, GPS has been the frontrunner of all these systems, dominating the market for two decades now - EGNSS (Galileo) is aimed at changing this market unbalance.

The EU’s ambition for EGNSS is to strongly impact European industry and society by incentivising the various application segments and creating jobs. Therefore, it is a priority to secure the development of this technology in Europe, and that is why the training of young scientists in this niche area is at the top of the European economic agenda.Combining GNSS systems to operate together is a new development known as multi-GNSS, which is key to provide instantaneous, high accuracy positioning anywhere in the world.

Although GNSS is routinely used in smartphones and in-car navigation with an accuracy of a few metres, it can deliver centimetres in real time if advanced techniques are employed in a multi- GNSS approach. This is the focus of TREASURE, in a bid to boost the use of Galileo worldwide in support of a range of applications and, more importantly, to inspire new ones that can arise when this is fully developed.

To demonstrate the TREASURE vision and its market prospects, the project will also develop a conceptual prototype of a service that can offer the enhanced real-time high accuracy positioning that is desperately needed by markets such in the Agri-Tech and offshore operations businesses, and potentially many others that will become apparent as the project evolves and results are disseminated.

ACHIEVEMENTS

In TREASURE we are studying and modelling all the errors that degrade GNSS positioning accuracy and incorporating these models into specialised high accuracy positioning techniques.

Significant progress was obtained in all fronts of the research through coordinated projects carried out at PhD level by the 13 individual TREASURE ESRs (early stage researchers), who are hosted by the various academic and industrial partners.

Just to mention one example, a key aspect of the research is to mitigate the effects of the atmosphere, in particular related to space weather, which can often create impairing conditions in the atmosphere’s upper, ionised layer, the ionosphere. These effects vastly reduce satellite communication and positioning accuracy. Progress in this area has been achieved in TREASURE by improving existing forecasting algorithms and by suitably tweaking the use of a specialised tomographic software. Concurrently, regarding the lower, neutral layer of the atmosphere, a new statistical testing approach has been implemented to counter the effect of severe terrestrial weather events that can also pose a major threat to high accuracy GNSS positioning.

Achievements in the other inter-related research areas have also been significant, including in the development of the new positioning algorithms themselves and in first steps towards our service prototype.

In 2018, two TREASURE teams entered the Farming by satellite competition. The teams were formed to stimulate teamwork and collective thinking among the ESRs. I am proud to inform that both teams were selected for the finals of the contest, with one of the TREASURE teams winning second place in the whole competition!

WHAT’S NEXT?

The project recently underwent its mid-term review by the European Commission and passed with flying colours. Reinforcing the project’s relevance, H2020 Space Work Programme 2018-2020 recently opened the call “SU-SPACE-EGNSS-3-2019-2020: EGNSS applications fostering societal resilience and protecting the environment”, where one of the challenges relates to “Precision agriculture, mapping and surveying”, which are right at the core of the action in TREASURE.

The second phase of the project will see a shift from initial, preliminary model development to the delivery of final solutions, with actual integration into positioning algorithms that will be implemented and tested in real life experiments, for validation in close collaboration with industry. Over the next two years a final and comprehensive market analysis will be completed, and the conceptual prototype of a potential service will be developed.

 

TURNING POINT FOR GALILEO

By 2020, Galileo will be fully operational and provide positioning data of unprecedented accuracy. Galileo will rival but, crucially, will also be interoperable with GPS, as well as with systems such as Beidou and GLONASS. Clearly, the development of EGNSS and its integration with these other satellite systems, in a multi-GNSS approach, is key for Europe’s competitiveness in this market, therefore the interest of the EU in funding projects like TREASURE. We are proud to be part of this effort.

TREASURE focuses on two existing GNSS techniques known as PPP (Precise Point Positioning) and NRTK (Network Real Time Kinematic), which currently mostly use GPS and GLONASS. Some of our industrial partners already offer services that exploit these techniques. It is expected that both techniques will potentially meet future real-time high accuracy positioning demands when Galileo is fully integrated, and TREASURE will definitely make a contribution in this field.

Interested? Find more information here