Photo grabbed from the RPD Challenge official YouTube Channel
Team Tala Tech, where Mr. Gerwin P. Guba of DOST Advanced Science and Technology Institute (DOST-ASTI) served as a consultant, is one of the winners of the Rapid Prototype Development (RPD) Challenge 2021. The team grabbed the Michibiki Award and hence been invited to attend the training and site visit program from Multi-GNSS Asia (MGA) in Tokyo, Japan on November 21-24, 2022.
“The Rapid Prototype Development (RPD) Challenge is a FREE Hackathon where teams create a disaster-related application prototype with guidance from Mentors, and participants are encouraged to squeeze their brains to tackle real-life issues through creative solutions,” said RPD’s official website.
The RPD Challenge 2021 is organized by MGA, the Geo-Informatics and Space Technology Development Agency (GISTDA) and the Cabinet Office of Japan, which runs the Quasi-Zenith satellite system (QZSS). The said event was held from October 2021 to March 2022 with over 16 teams completing the course by creating their own disaster management solutions with the support of GNSS experts.
“Our entry was about Automatic Tsunami Warning System which basically makes use of series of buoys or ASTI’s existing metbouy equipped with Sony Spresense board,” said Mr. Guba.
Photo grabbed from the RPD Challenge official YouTube Channel
The network for this prototype Automatic Tsunami Warning System will include the land station, master buoy, and support node. The purpose of the Tala Tech buoy was to be based on the meteorological buoy (metbouy) deployed by the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) in 2013. The proposed initial locations for this prototype are the coastal population, critical infrastructure for the supply chain, and the tourism industry (to know more about their presentation, click here).
“One of the main reasons why I accepted the challenge was because I was very interested in exploring the Sony Spresense board, with its multicore ARM®-based microcontroller (Cortex®-M4F × 6 cores) which is also a candidate MCU for the upcoming arQ2.0 main board as well as to evaluate the built-in cm-level accuracy positioning system of the board”, Engr. Guba added.
DOST-ASTI’s Mr. Guba also believed that this trip would significantly help improve the existing design of the said metbouy which may eventually give rise to another project proposal on next-generation of tsunami detection in collaboration with PHIVOLCS (Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology). Also, he considered that this will be a good opportunity to further help the team in exploring the QZSS abilities, particularly the newly announced Multi-GNSS Advanced Orbit and Clock Augmentation - Precise Point Positioning (MADOCA-PPP) service. The QZSS, also known as Michibiki, is a four-satellite regional time transfer system and a satellite-based augmentation system developed by the Japanese government, it can be sometimes referred to as the "Japanese GPS".
Along with Mr. Guba are the former members who developed Diwata microsatellites (Engr. Ariston Gonzalez, Engr. Delburg Mitchao, and Engr. Paolo Espiritu), and another consultant from Central Visayan Institute Foundation, Director of JAZC Marine Sciences Laboratory Dr. Janneli Lea Soria.
The two (2) other winning teams are the Team Softwel with “Early Warning System for Glacial Outburst Floods” from Nepal who is the MGA Grand Prize winner and the RBRU-GI with “Real Time Water Current & Location Monitoring” from Thailand who got the GISTDA Award.
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