Last week Detektia received an AI and Advanced Technologies Award from the Madrid City Council. The company incubated in the Park was recognized in the category for the best project of the Selective update of the digital twin challenge. The start-up integrates the latest satellite radar technologies with advanced AI algorithms to generate early warnings throughout the lifetime of an infrastructure through its EyeRADAR system. “Detektia uses satellite sensors and AI to measure to the millimeter how the terrain and buildings deform,” explained Candela Sancho, founder of the company. In addition to the award, the company takes home a cash prize of €40,000.
Digital twins
The awards are conceived from the conviction of the City Council that innovation and talent are the key pillars to address the great challenges that we face today in cities and in society. Among the challenges posed in this edition, three refer to the concept of the digital twin. It is a digital representation of a physical object, process or service: from a jet engine to entire buildings or cities. These virtual replicas are used to run simulations before creating and deploying the object, process, or service to understand how it will work. This saves costs and time, as simulations in the digital model are performed on a computer and their results prevent future failures in the physical model.
Add and go on
Detektia’s achievement of this AI and Advanced Technologies Award is a new achievement for this young company. Since its constitution in 2019, this start-up from the ESA-BIC programme has won several awards. Thus, in 2020 it won the challenge Anticipating the geotechnical behavior of the terrain of Sacyr iChallenges and also obtained a second prize in the Innovation Award of the same corporation. For its part, in 2021 Detektia won the ESA Global Space Market Challenge award in the downstream category. And even more, because that same year Detektia also won the Understanding Award from the Business and Society Foundation, in the Operations category.
Very competitive edition
This second edition of the AI and Advanced Technologies Awards has seen a notable increase in nominations. Thus, more than 130 proposals have been received, which is 60% more than in 2022.
The award ceremony took place at the MIL – Madrid Innovation Lab. Virginia Blanco, general director of Innovation of the consistory, thanked all the candidacies and presented the 12 challenges posed and the companies awarded for their proposals in each one:
- Sustainability certificates applied to various sectors by VOTTUN;
- Design of a citizen information model using conversational bots for virtual visits;
- Improved recycling efficiency by Sadako Technologies;
- Predictive Smart Apps by Qaleon;
- Early identification of threats to the citizen: desert;
- Security in basic infrastructures by Red Team Shield, S.L.;
- Intelligent Satellite Image Processing by SKASENSE S.L.;
- Selective digital twin update by Detektia;
- Predictive models on the digital twin by QUANTIA Ingeniería y Consultoría S.L.;
- Smart applications in public bidding processes by Caja Blanca Datos S.L.;
- Mechanisms for predicting and controlling chronic diseases by Topazium Artificial Intelligence;
- Rehabilitation mechanisms by Inrobics.
Among the award-winning projects are multiple themes: from remote sensing applied to reforestation projects or urban heat islands to devices to prevent chronic diseases, including garbage sorting robots, chatbots for virtual visits or software to classify drone threats, manage tourism companies and improve public bidding processes. Among the winners is the interactive robot for patients and elderly people in rehabilitation by Inrobics, a UC3M spin-off recently awarded at the I Health to Market Awards of the FPCM and EIT Health Spain.
