The European Union’s investment in infrastructure has been declining since 2009. This has resulted in the emergence of hard infrastructure investment gap across European energy, transport, water and sanitation, and telecom sectors, which the European Investment Bank estimates at €688 billion per year. Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) technology is an integral to European infrastructure development. GPR is a non-invasive geophysical method that uses radar pulses to image and study the sub-surface picture of what is below the surface of the ground for infrastructure applications across multiple industries. However, state-of-the-art GPR technologies suffer from a significant problem of lack or insufficient data regarding the sub-surface material composition and sub-surface layers and bodies.
SGPR.TECH has developed next-generation surface radar that will become the basis of many applications dedicated to various industries. Unlike the impulse GPR radar, the Spectral Ground-Penetrating Radar (SGPR) technology uses FMCW (Frequency-Modulated Continuous Wave) radar with a broadband antenna that conducts the analysis in the domain of frequency. Due to different ground material properties of electrical permeability in the frequency function, our innovation enables to obtain sub-surface 3D imaging with the possibility of distinguishing material composition and density.
As an analogy, SGPR can see ‘colors’ and therefore enables far more precise modelling of the structures and indication of their nature and material, compared to GRP that is ‘monochrome’. Moreover, SGPR not only collects data that no other device can, but it is also fully automated, does it faster with less power demand and is cheaper. Such technological and economic leap is enabled by cloud-processing infrastructure supported by a machine learning (ML), where the burden of data processing will be transferred to the cloud so that the person using the radar receives instant results using the knowledge base created by the SGPR team (i.e. algorithms, models, databases).
To make a truly disruptive product and to realize the significant business opportunity in targeted markets, the objective of the overall project is to i) build-out the cloud infrastructure, ii) miniaturize the hardware and iii) pilot the final SGPR product in industrial applications.
