SMART&START ITALIA

Smart&Start Italia is an initiative aimed at supporting the creation and growth of innovative startups with a strong technological focus across all Italian regions. The incentive seeks to foster a new entrepreneurial culture linked to the digital economy, enhance the results of scientific and technological research, and encourage the return of talents from abroad, commonly known as the "brain drain."

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In this context, Latitudo 40 stands out as an example of innovation and advanced technology, offering a solution designed to overcome technological barriers through a simplified development environment.

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The Latitudo 40 project aims to capture value in the Earth Observation (EO) market sector by developing an innovative technological platform capable of offering a series of vertical applications to support territorial monitoring and critical infrastructure management using data acquired from satellite sensors, potentially integrated with “in situ” measurements.

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The project’s vision is to create a new product positioning the promoters as a one-stop-shop for monitoring services related to territory and critical infrastructure through the complete and integrated management of the entire information lifecycle, from downloading images, through various processing and calculation stages, to identifying the necessary information for specific applications.

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This research and development project intends to provide new tools for monitoring critical infrastructures such as roads, bridges, railways, and pipelines, whose extension makes traditional in situ inspection techniques economically burdensome and inefficient.

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Continuous and multi-scale territorial monitoring is essential for forecasting and preventing catastrophic events and enhances the efficiency of ordinary maintenance of critical infrastructures. It supports mitigation planning and optimizes the functioning and effectiveness of alert systems for at-risk communities. Moreover, continuous monitoring significantly reduces the cost of information acquisition regarding the network.

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Such continuous monitoring is possible only through the integration of satellite observation data and in situ measurements.

Through the Latitudo 40 Research and Development project, the goal is to initiate the study and definition of an innovative technological solution capable of providing multichannel access and offering processed information to remote monitoring centers. This will enable analysis and understanding of territorial phenomena, facilitating real-time alert mechanisms and consequent risk mitigation.

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The project adopts a systematic vision extendable to various EO sectors and aims to offer an innovative approach to increase the resilience of territorial systems, improve event monitoring processes, alert the population, and manage post-event actions, including support for emergency teams.

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Latitudo 40 will be configured as an integrated, reliable, and versatile system that enables multiparametric territorial monitoring and event correlation to provide a comprehensive overview to public or private bodies (civil protection, technical offices) responsible for territorial control and risk mitigation.

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The proposed solution aims to bring significant innovation to both the space and environmental monitoring sectors through a platform that integrates satellite systems and distributed sensor networks across the territory. Users will receive georeferenced information on existing geographic information systems or web mapping (such as Google Maps), following a process of data processing, correlation, and interpretation based on a cloud-based big data approach.

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The objective is to enhance the effectiveness of monitoring and prevention systems by providing a tool that allows operators to focus their efforts on data analysis rather than cataloging, processing, and interpreting the data.

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Beyond the core research and development goals, the proposers also intend to:

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• Simplify access for non-expert users to continuous territorial monitoring platforms based on EO data;
• Significantly reduce the cost of territorial services, also by utilizing open data such as those derived from European missions like Copernicus;
• Combine data from different satellites, for example Copernicus data with COSMO-SkyMed data;
• Offer the possibility to create an application ecosystem where third-party developers can release apps based on specific analysis models;
• Promote the adoption of EO-based solutions in Italian and European businesses and public administrations through a cloud system that transforms raw data into valuable information and products.

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