March 31, 2022 marked a special event for A.U.G. Signals Ltd. (AUG) – we successfully completed a 3.5 year collaborative project with our partners, York University, York Regional Police, and Ontario Good Roads Association, to develop ARGUS: Radar-based All-Weather Roadway Safety System under the Canadian Safety and Security Program (CSSP)supported by Defence Research and Development Canada’s Centre for Security Science (DRDC CSS).
Background – With millions of people on Canadian roads every day, roadway safety is a big priority for participants in road traffic and more so for first responders. At a typical scene of a road collision, the first responders such as police officers, firefighters, paramedics are among the first to arrive and provide assistance. Police officers also have responsibilities such as assisting and investigating vehicle crash, deploying and providing equipment, overseeing work zone, patrolling vehicle pullovers, and performing traffic control, etc. These tasks performed along the roadways increase the risk of vehicles hitting first responders while they are carrying out their duties.
While many factors contribute to this safety issue (weather, impaired driving, speeding) and various recommendations have been made to mitigate the risks of collision, annually significant number of first responders are killed attending to roadway emergencies, and experience near misses on a weekly basis. Nation wide police officer survey performed during the project revealed that a majority (91%) of the participants do not have access to any device or technology that detects and warns them about possible collisions a few seconds before they occur, 75% of participants would consider using a system that can warn them about oncoming dangerous traffic while they work on the sides of roads or stationery in their vehicle (inside and outside the vehicle). AUG and its partners aimed to develop ARGUS: Radar-based All-Weather Roadway Safety System addressing this gap by combining low-cost radar front-end (RFE) with advanced analytics and threat analysis to ascertain threats accurately, and alerts first responders.
Achievements – From concept to field trials, AUG and its partners have developed ARGUS and demonstrated its capability to improve the safety of the first responders by detecting and alerting the responders to the risks while they are carrying out tasks on the road and allowing them the time (>3seconds) to react and escape from the risks. This is proven by the 95% pass rate of ARGUS in all the field trial scenarios based on the accuracy and timeliness of ARGUS.
Specifically, as an affordable and portable system, ARGUS
Accurately detects and localizes the oncoming vehicles
Efficiently analyzes threats and foresees accidents risks and warns first responders in time (>3 seconds) to take adequate safety measures.
Provides targeted and effective warnings to the individual responder to realize threats and take appropriate action in time.
Photo: ARGUS Field Trial
Moving forward – ARGUS is ready to contribute to improving the roadway safety of the first responders. AUG is also actively pursuing other applications for ARGUS, such as work zone safety to expand the applicability of ARGUS and generate more benefits to the community from the project’s outcomes and beyond.
On March 18, 2022, A.U.G. Signals in cooperation with A.U.G. Signals Hellas deployed at the City of Corinth Greece a TRITON, AUG’s online multi-parameter water quality monitoring system.
Certified by ISO 9001:2015 in design, assembly, installation and servicing of water monitoring systems TRITON is an innovative online continuous water quality monitoring platform. This platform allows users to preemptively detect and diagnose problems in their water distribution networks by providing real-time data that can be accessible anytime and anywhere. TRITON provides continuous 24/7 online testing. By continuous on-line real-time monitoring prevents drinking water contaminations by notifying through smartphones the authorities when a water contaminant is present and its concentration grows. Hence, actions will be taken before the water contaminant reaches to levels that are harmful to the peoples’ health. Together with its leakage detection capability, TRITON is a powerful supporting system in monitoring drinking water in smart cities projects.
The partnership and close collaboration between AUG Signals and SOCAAR (Southern Ontario Centre for Atmospheric Aerosol Research) at the University of Toronto has started since the beginning of AirSENCE development in 2014. Leveraging AUG’s expertise in machine-learning-based signal processing, multi-sensor information fusion and system integration with SOCAAR’s exceptional talents and state-of-the-art air quality monitoring facility as well as innovative research on atmospheric pollutants and sensors, AirSENCE has evolved to an advanced, accurate, and affordable Continuous Ambient Air Quality Micro-Monitoring Station (caaqMMS) providing comprehensive and accurate real-time air quality monitoring and contributing to the global effort in net-zero transformation to reduce GHG emissions, improve air quality and mitigate environmental inequity. https://mailchi.mp/utoronto.ca/engineeringwrap-up-5754277?e=853d27bc52
AUG is proud to be awarded by ESA among the other two winners in the downstream category for the “Novel Crop Disease Risk Assessment and Crop Monitoring Web-Based Tool” project. AUG would like to express our appreciation to all our collaborators, especially to AAFC and CSA who have always provided us with great support in the success of previous and current projects. We certainly look forward to more successful collaboration in the future.
Last week, A.U.G. Signals’ President and CEO, Dr. George Lampropoulos, attended the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Dubai as the reward A.U.G. Signals received being the third place winner of the Global Space Market Challenge 2021 organized by European Space Agency (ESA) and EURISY. Asides from pitching our project, innovative satellite-based crops disease risk assessment and crops monitoring tool, our President had a pleasure to meet with the Director General of ESA, Josef Aschbacher, during the event (October 26, 2021).
On September 30, our President and CEO, Dr. George Lampropolous, had a productive meeting with Mayor Vasilis Nanopoulos in his office at the city hall of Corinth, Greece with an effort of raising the awareness of sustainably monitoring the environment. Specifically, municipality of Corinth is interested in A.U.G. Signals Ltd. (AUG)’s project of developing wildfire detection and management tool and the municipality is committed to the successful outcome of this project by providing AUG with in-kind support and their expertise in fire fighting and prevention.
Dr. George Lampropoulos meeting with Mayor Vasilis Nanopoulos
AUG and UofT SOCAAR to carry out new project for Industrial Air Quality Monitoring
AUG Signals is delighted to be a part of the new academic-industry collaborative project with the Southern Ontario Centre for Atmospheric Aerosol Research (SOCAAR) at the University of Toronto.
This is a one-year project where the partners will expand AirSENCE, an advanced, accurate and afforable Continuous Ambient Air Quality Micro-Monitoring Station (caaqMMS) to AirSENCE-FIM (Fence-line and Industrial Monitoring) for pilot tests at selected strategic locations in the industrial manufacturing communities.
AirSENCE-FIM is a new product line that involves the integration of new sensors and the added capabilities to measure VOC and H2S, as well as improvements to the sensitivity, longevity and seasonal accuracy shifts of the original AirSENCE devices. This industry-academic collaboration will help AirSENCE remain competitive in the smart cities landscape. Through offering new fence-line monitoring capabilities, AirSENCE will be able to better meet the expectations of clients operating within communities near major industrial emitters (oil sands, mining, pulp and paper, refineries and etc.)
Increased awareness of air pollution and its health impacts means there is a fast-growing need worldwide to monitor air quality. However, current low-cost air quality sensors have shortcomings with respect to sensor drift and degradation, which, along with interference effects from temperature and humidity, create challenges to acquire accurate data for long-term air quality analyses. Through continuous investment as well as collaboration with air quality experts at SOCAAR, AUG aims to overcome these market challenges and further enforce the user confidence in the accuracy and reliability of AirSENCE. The new AirSENCE-FIM will further expand AUG Signals’ environmental monitoring product portfolio and create an affordable and sustainable solution for industrial communities.
This project is funded and supported by the NSERC Alliance – Ontario Center of Excellence VIP Program.
AUG Signals is pleased to announce the official kickoff of our new CSA Project, titled “Improving Space-based Radar Reflectometry for Better Ocean State and Target Monitoring Using Advanced Data Processing”
This is a part of the CSA renewed funding initiative, smartEarth, which aims to develop earth observation applications with the use of satellite data.
Recently, there has been strong interest in space-based radar reflectometry—a procedure that utilizes signals of opportunity from Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) and communication satellites. Signal from such satellites continuously reflect from the earth surface, including oceans, and the reflected signal is received by observer satellites where the characteristics of the reflectors are analyzed. Microsatellites are preferred as observers due to their low cost, short deployment cycle and, most importantly, short distance from ground reflectors.
The objective of this new AUG project is to significantly improve the performance of space-based radar reflectometry for ocean-surface target monitoring by overhauling state-of-the-art data processing technology. This is technology is very important for Canada as space-based radar reflectometry using fleet of microsatellites can provide us the elusive capability of continuously monitoring arctic ocean.
Processed signals and data from satellites can provide valuable information on the geolocation of vessels, ships and other ocean-based transportation systems. Such time sensitive information can support Canada’s defense and security measures, as well as commercial logistics companies to understand the location of vessels, determine best shipping routes, and estimate delivery status.
Ocean monitoring using GNSS reflectometry also has many useful applications in the environmental sector. Take climate change for instance, the raising of earth’s average temperature poses many serious threats to our planet. With increasingly more glaciers and land-based ice melting, the rise in global sea level has caused devastating consequences to coastal habitats. Therefore, monitoring Canadian sea ice frequently and efficiently is an important and critical tool for the fight against climate change.
AUG awarded new AAFC project for the development of a crop disease risk assessment tool
Earlier this year in April, AUG won a new project under Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC)’s AgriScience Program. This project is focused on developing and demonstrating a novel crop disease risk assessment tool using remote sensing.
This tool will incorporate early crop classification, crop phenology and soil moisture estimates derived from earth observation remote sensing data. The objective of this 3-year project is to develop technologies that are capable of daily crop disease risk assessment and monitoring, including early season crop classification, enhancing crop phenology estimation and perdiction, and soil moisture estimation techniques.
This project is developed in collaboration with AAFC, Canola Council of Canada, and Bioenterprise Corporation. The final product of this project will be a web-based tool that will be fully tested and validated to assess and monitor crop disease risks.
The project will also further enhance AAFC’s technology to estimate surface soil moisture and crop biophysical information using SAR satellites. The crop phenology and soil moisture information will be integrated with meteorological information to develop a web-based disease risk tool for both the Canadian and global agriculture industry. The technology will positively transform agricultural production and efficiency by applying emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and big data analytics. It will also strengthen knowledge transfer and adoption by utilizing open access free satellite sensors, such as Sentinel-1/2 and RADARSAT Constellation Mission Compact Polarimetry data that will be conducive to a larger scale deployment of the technology.
