What Can Galileo Do for Me?

The European GNSS Agency (GSA) sits down one-on-one with Andy Proctor, Lead Technologist (Satellite Navigation) at Innovate UK – the UK’s technology innovation agency.

What is Innovate UK and how is it involved in the space applications sector?

Innovate UK is the UK’s innovation agency dedicated to accelerating economic growth.

Taking a new idea to market is a challenge, and we fund, support and connect innovative businesses through a mix of people and programmes to accelerate sustainable economic growth. Since 2007, Innovate UK has co-invested around GBP 3 billion in the private sector, assisting over 5,000 businesses.

We operate across 12 main thematic areas, one of which is space applications, where we focus on specific areas – innovation, game-changing applications – essentially how you use the data that comes from space. This is the area where the UK believes future growth will come from.

Innovate UK also runs competitions in this area. For example, we recently funded a competition in location-based services (LBS). We also worked with colleagues on a competition to stimulate the innovative use of space derived data in urban environments, looking to improve decision making with space derived data and at how space data can benefit environmental applications. The rail sector and autonomous sectors are also important as space data is key within these areas.

Is Innovate UK involved in Horizon 2020?

Yes, we work closely with the GSA here, managing some of the UK’s involvement in Horizon 2020. We also set up National Contact Points for all the Horizon 2020 themes as first points of contact for businesses wishing to engage with the Horizon 2020 process. The contact points work with multiple government departments, including those who hold Horizon 2020 programme committee seats, to ensure that these opportunities are available to UK business.

Can you touch on your work with Galileo applications?

As mentioned, a number of Innovate UK competitions include GNSS in their scope. In fact, we just ran a specific competition for feasibility studies looking at operational applications of GNSS at the receiver level.  Called ‘What can Galileo do for me?’, this competition aims to put technology providers together with actual GNSS end users.

In line with and in support of the GSA’s delegated responsibility over the Galileo service provision, our goal here is to build a complete supply chain for Galileo. An important part of this is to raise awareness and understanding within the customer base about what Galileo can do.

At Innovate UK we are well placed to do this as we are all ex-industry and are thus close to the market – we know our areas very well. We can pick up the phone and speak to most of the core people in the industry. That’s what the Galileo competition is about.

In terms of the downstream GNSS application market, we are interested areas involving industrial data protection, where we look at how businesses can protect data, including personal data, which could include location information. Transport, a large thematic area for us, includes such rail applications as a new competition for technical innovation in rail signalling, along with driverless cars, future cities, energy systems and so on.

For us it is not just about business-to-business, we also look at, for example, how we can enhance experiences in retail. Indoor location is interesting for that. In fact, we have a competition coming up on this topic specifically, so perhaps we could think of location-authenticated data being of use to improve the retail sector?

At the International Navigation Conference (INC 2015) last February you talked about the risks involved in relying on GNSS data and how to mitigate them. Can you expand on this?

There are various threats to the continuity of GNSS data for navigation and timing systems, such as interference, jamming and spoofing. The question is how do we protect this valuable resource? What alternative or complimentary services are there? What technology is available to ensure quality of service?

We’ve spent a large amount of money over the last few years on developing technology for detecting, classifying, analysing and mitigating interference to GNSS. For example, many government departments depend on GNSS, so how can we make them resilient? A lot of work is being done at the policy level in collaboration with the US and EU on methodology, policy and strategies.

My core message at the conference was ‘we’ve done the technology, we’ve put frameworks in place, we now need to look at the differences that technology can make in operational environments’. Where we identified a gap is in user understanding of what data they are dependent upon, the risk that entails and what they should do about it.

For example, if I’m using GPS or Galileo and I’m delivering a service, I’m focused on that service. But if I lose the data that’s coming through GNSS, how does it impact my service and do I care about losing my data? It’s a question of taking the issue from technology development – from detecting and classifying – into the realm of risk management. And this is a matter of continuity and cost-benefit analysis.

We’re now in a position where CEOs need to sign off on some of the technology we developed. There needs to be a fundamental understanding of why they need to worry about their dependency on GNSS data. Government and industry need to be thinking about this as the next way forward.

This comes back to the question of ‘what can Galileo do for me?’ If you understand what Galileo is doing, you can assign risks. We have to invest to mitigate the risk, as we cannot defeat the threat completely. Sometimes it’s essential to be able to mitigate the risk and sometimes it’s not worth it. Unless you understand what the data means to you, in a language you understand as a service developer, you’re not going to move to the next phase.

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More information:

Innovate UK