GRAVITY 04 Challenges
In GRAVITY 04, innovators worked to solve the seven challenges below. Watch the videos to learn more about their problem statements and desired outcomes.
Department for Infrastructure and Transport
Assessing Road State in the Space State
The South Australian Department for Infrastructure and Transport (DIT) is responsible for maintaining and improving more than 23,000 kilometres of sealed and unsealed roads across South Australia as part of ensuring safe, reliable and efficient travel for all road users. The vast distances across the state road network make regular inspection and assessment difficult and time intensive.
The challenge here is to identify and validate new ways to assess the condition of road assets (and potentially other types of assets such as electrical equipment and structures) using space capabilities, which will ultimately lead to developing more effective predictive asset models and in doing so improve the current maintenance planning process for South Australia.
Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Company
Removing the Bottleneck: On-the-spot natural disaster payments by utilising satellite images
In recent years, Japan has experienced an increasing number of natural disasters such as typhoons, earthquakes, and floods. When a disaster occurs, a huge number of claim notices are reported from insured customers in a short period of time.
Damage is usually assessed by an on-site investigation to determine a repair estimate. However, in the event of a disaster, more time is required to initiate these processes, creating bottlenecks in assessments, and delays in payment for customers.
We challenge innovators to help us to achieve claim payment at the same day of claim notice, at the height of inundation of damaged properties by utilizing space datasets, including satellite imagery.
Whale and Dolphin Conservation
Kickstarting a Blue Revolution: Saving the Whales, the Ocean and the World
The ocean covers 71% of the surface of the planet and is our largest carbon sink, and yet it receives just 1% of global climate finance. Coastal ecosystems such as mangroves and seagrass have begun to receive the attention they deserve, with governments and businesses increasingly investing in them as nature-based solutions to the climate and ecological crises, however, the open ocean remains largely overlooked, overexploited and under protected.
Whales could change this.
The growing appreciation of how whales stimulate phytoplankton growth and sequester carbon creates a new route to unlocking ‘deep blue carbon’ and potentially kickstarting a new market for climate investment and restoration. The potential is there, but we are held back by the difficulty in acquiring the data. Research is underway looking at the localised impact of whales on phytoplankton growth, while a series of initiatives are using satellite technology to spot whales from space.
This challenge seeks to bring these ideas together: measuring phytoplankton productivity against the presence of whale populations so as to unlock support for whale-based, deep-blue carbon climate solutions.
The NatWest Group
Helping Businesses Transition to a Net Zero Economy using Space Data
We want your help to support our business customers understand their environmental footprint and what positive actions they can take to reduce their impact. The barrier is that our customers rarely have the time, or the technical knowledge to give us the data we need. For those providing data to us, the process can be timeconsuming and burdensome.
We need to combine accurate, real-time data from a variety of sources to create a clear picture of our customers’ emissions. The challenge is to find a way to flexibly combine space data, bank data, and third party sources, to create a single customer climate profile.
A winning solution should do this without relying on user input, so that we can eliminate friction for our customers, and allow us to combine data in an agile manner, so that we can use the right information for each industry and sector that we work in.
The inclusion of space data is crucial for this strategy, as it will give regular, accurate, and transparent insights, helping us to make better decisions.
Statistics Canada - Construction
Presently STC and CMHC are engaged in a proof of concept modernization initiative to use remote sensing combined with artificial intelligence to detect the start of building
construction. While much progress on this has been made, a challenge we have encountered is the cost of acquiring whole geographies of data in order to determine if new construction has started on projects with very small footprints.
Our objective with this challenge will be to gain economies through focused data collection over areas approved for development/building construction.
Using open/available municipal GIS datasets, develop an automated process for aggregating inventories land available for development. Datasets should include shapefiles for the lots as well as any associated administrative data about the lots.