©EU-RAINS4

What has the ATTRACT seed funding enabled you to do so far?

ATTRACT is currently being a great opportunity for us to truly connect advanced research with potential business and societal applications. Our startup has been able to:

• Strengthen the collaboration between business and university. It has helped us to co-create research topics that have value for both the research and business communities, by directly applying the first results to existing business applications, in the water management sector.
• Collect, analyse and process rain data from the first and unique rain radar system installed in urban environment within the EU, in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
• Develop the data server for easy sharing and transfer.
• Get the necessary financial incentive to boost our R&D development and investigate new advanced clutter removal algorithms in urban areas, in collaboration with the Delft university of Technology and the Ruisdael observatory. This development was until now only performed for science and research purposes. This new development can now be potentially integrated to life/business applications dealing with hyperlocal rainfall management.
• Connect with a group of students from Aalto university to think out of the box and innovate even further with using our technology for different business sectors. Some prototypes of currently being developed.

What challenges have you faced so far?

• The biggest challenge we are facing so far is the time constrain, as a 12 months duration for state-of-the-art technology research is pretty difficult to achieve.
• We also didn’t anticipate that collecting data from the rain radar would require more specific processing than we thought, delaying the availability of the data for new algorithm development.
• A final challenge was to find a way to increase the manpower within the university to optimise the chance of success by involving master topics to the project in a very short time

Where does your ATTRACT journey go from here?

We are confident that the algorithms under development in this project will drastically help improving the rainfall information in and around the urban area. With these results in mind, the next steps will be to:

• Validate the new processing algorithm for different rainfall events and compare with current technology.
• Merge with different rain data sources to improve the coverage.
• Integrate the algorithm within the radar process in real-time for future operational applications
• Develop possibilities to integrate the result into other sensors from the Ruisdael research observatory
• Continue developing business potential together with the city of Rotterdam and the students from Aalto university.

Sum up in two sentences the advantages of the ATTRACT Programme over other research funding schemes.

Thanks to its reduced administration and funding schemes, The ATTRACT program offers both an opportunity to focus 100% on the innovation and its impact for business and society rather than on finance and reporting. This provides a greater return on investment for the project community.

For more information

Visit the EU-RAINS4 project site.