The commitment to innovation, extroversion and applied research that attempts to provide solutions to specific problems of the anthropic activity, brought another positive result for Planetek Hellas, as it was announced among the winners of the Horizon 2020 SME-Instrument program, of the European Commission.
The participation of Planetek Hellas in the specific call of phase1 of the program, was made through the proposal OP3C (On board Processing for Compression and Clouds Classification in hyperspectral satellite data), which aims at the creation and launch of a product (HW & SW) to be placed onboard of satellites that carry hyperspectral sensors. The component proposed will automatically recognize the cloud coverage and compress the images that these sensors will receive. This solution comes to meet specific problems faced by manufacturers of hyperspectral sensors for satellites, which lie on one hand, on the atmospheric conditions during the image capture (cloud-cover) and on the other hand, on the size of the image itself (many TB) , which make its transfer to Earth extremely difficult.
The statistics
The results, published by the European Commission, on Friday, January 9, found Planetek Hellas to be one of the only 14 winners of the "SPACE" topic of the SME-Instrument, out of 185 applications submitted from across Europe, until September 24, 2014, confirming once more the ability of the company to compete successfully at a European level (paneuropean success rate 7.57%). Especially, if one considers that for all the 13 topics of the program, there were 122 participants from Greece and only 2 that managed to get funded, the importance of the success extends even further (success rate nation wide 1.64% ).
Statements
«Our sector is highly specialized and is really great to be able to work in your own country, in an environment that allows you to claim the possibility to see your own personal effort in the years find real implementation», said 27year old Dimitrios Sykas, who along with his work engagement in Planetek Hellas, is finishing in parallel his PhD on hyperspectral satellite data processing, at the Polytechnic of Athens.
Stelios Bollanos, co-founder and director of Planetek Hellas commented: «A significant success that brings us closer to the phase2 of the SME-Instrument and the achievement of our objectives in this specific segment of the space market. We are happy to see that our strategic decision to adopt the principles of Design Thinking in every aspect of our activity is appreciated also by the European Commission. We continue with the same determination, to be able to offer to our customers’ real problem solving technology».
Few words
For the program H2020 SME-Instrument of the European Commission
The main objective of H2020 SME-Instrument is the creation of the «European Innovation Champions League». An elite group of companies moving Europe forward in the global market of research, growth and innovation. The program is divided into 3 phases and is addressed to highly innovative small and medium sized European companies, which already have a prototype of the product that they want to introduce to the market.
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