Thus the vehicles become sentinels of the environment
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A device for the environmental monitoring son of a prestigious collaboration: the one with the famous Senseable City Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston directed by the architect Charles Ratti. Is called Flatburn and was developed between Italy and the United States by the innovative SME Fae Technologya Bergamo-based benefit company that operates in the fields of design, prototyping, planning and production of solutions for the integrated electronics sector.
What is Flatburn
But what is Flatburn? It is a system self-powered by solar energy, with mechanical parts that can be made with 3D printers available to anyone, and equipped with sensors. Installed on road vehicles such as buses and cars it is therefore able to detect important parameters such as the air qualityL’energy efficiencyL’acoustic impactL’humidity and the heat islands in urban contexts. And make that data available to those who will have to make the best decisions in terms of public policies. The project is released under license open source and is part of the City Scanner project. Among other things, the Italian SME has signed a two-year agreement with the Senseable City Lab as a “consortium member”, so the device will not be the only one to be developed in synergy.
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Meanwhile, for Flatburn, the company has developed new technological know-how in a team with researchers from MIT in Boston, testing the device jointly between electronic engineers from Fae Technology and MIT experts at Amsterdam. In fact, a few days ago they worked side by side optimizing a pilot project to be implemented in the capital of the Netherlands.
“Thanks to the continuous development of synergies with the world of research, the know-how of Fae Technology continues to experience a phase of evolution and progress – commented Gianmarco Lanza, president and CEO of Fae Technology – the launch of Flatburn represents a sign of further development of the membership with the Senseable City Lab of MIT in Boston, testifying the skills and the ability of the two teams to work side by side in various locations around the world : a synergistic activity that consolidates the international scope of Fae Technology and its people. The results relaunch our innovative role within the smart city context and in particular in the collection and processing of environmental data”.
The aim of the project is therefore to support and support institutions and citizens providing solid elements from which to develop strategic solutions in the field of environmental sustainability and climate change in general: “An answer to one of the greatest challenges of our times, to help generate a positive impact on communities around the planet” concludes the ‘CEO of the Bergamo SME which has a technological hub in Kilometro Rosso, the city’s innovation district, with two production plants in Gazzaniga and Vertova.
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City Scanner, the platform that transforms vehicles into sentinels of the environment
City Scannerthe larger project that Flatburn fits into, is the environmental monitoring platform which manages – also thanks to devices such as the one we are talking about – to transform normal road vehicles into a mobile sensing infrastructure which provides communities with sensitive data on the quality of the environment in which they live. The detectors can in fact be mounted on vehicles such as buses and cars through a magnetic connection and are autonomous thanks to the integrated photovoltaic panel capable of storing a surplus of energy useful in low light conditions. The project is already active in seven cities around the world, including New York, Amsterdam, Boston and Stockholm, and its introduction is being studied in three other cities.
“In developing Flatburn we integrated the latest advances in IoT, artificial intelligence and environmental sciences with a robust data validation and analytics methodology,” he says. Simone Moraresearcher at MIT’s Senseable City Lab and head of research at City Scanner – we embed this process in a platform that requires minimal infrastructure, which can be adopted in different contexts and customized by institutions and by citizens themselves”.
In short, Flatburn is one of the new types of detectors drive-by environmental monitoring (i.e. hosted by a vehicle) developed by MIT’s Senseable City Lab in collaboration with Fae Technology, combining an open source approach with a robust validation methodology. As mentioned, the research group tested the device and calibrated it in relation to the road vehicles in circulation and is publicly releasing information on how to build it, use it and interpret the data. The choice ofopen source it is required and serves to accelerate innovation, foster its diffusion and contribute to the long-term sustainability of the technology.
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What you can do with Flatburn
Among the opportunities made possible by Flatburn are, for example, the evaluation ofenergy efficiency of buildings using thermal imaging or laser analysis of polluting particles in the air to determine the different sources of pollution and finally the road quality mapping based on the vibrations of the vehicle, using the accelerometers, a feature that in metropolises such as Rome it would be really helpful. Not only that: there is also the possibility of correlating environmental measurements with traffic flows, the presence of trees or the average income of neighborhoods.
In short, there are many opportunities: “By intertwining the information returned by the sensors with public domain databases, sensitive data can be obtained to plan urban interventions or to implement certain environmental policies” reads a note. Flatburn can by the way communicate in real time with other electronic devices, including smartphones, sharing real-time data on the quality of the city’s environment. The research activity has also broadened the applicability of the data collected by the detector through the management of artificial intelligence algorithms.
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