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Call for Proposals – Fifth GRSS Student Grand Challenge

Call for Proposals - Fifth IEEE GRSS Student Grand Challenge

The IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS) is proud to announce the Fifth GRSS Student Grand Challenge (SGC) in which student teams will have to develop an end-to-end remote sensing application based on unmanned vehicles (e.g. drones, remote controlled planes or helicopters, underwater vehicles, rovers, stratospheric balloons…). The application topic is completely open, and the innovative aspects and feasibility of the proposal will be positively considered during the evaluation and selection of the five winning teams. Projects will be presenting their results in a dedicated session at IGARSS 2026 in Washington DC, USA.

Teams willing to participate must send a brief description of their mission concept (< 10 pages), before November 30th, 2024, indicating:

  • Team’s composition (5-10 members and an endorsing professor), background and expertise, motivation, and signed commitment letter for the whole duration of the project (see schedule below).
  • Scientific rationale and feasibility of the proposed innovative technique(s), i.e. the ways to conduct the proposed observations, in terms of platforms, sensors, data processing techniques…
  • Development plan, including testing, during the whole duration of the project (1.5 years), compliant with the challenge timeline shown below.
  • Budget proposal: Budget can be higher, but the GRSS request is limited to USD $10,000. Eligible expenses may include renting of computational resources, purchase of one computer, drone, and the necessary electronics to conduct the proposed work.
  • If the proposing team is not yet part of an already established GRSS Student Branch Chapter, it is important that they commit to form a new Chapter by the end of 2025.
  • The proposing team must commit to attend monthly meetings (1 to 1.5 h long) to provide status updates to and receive management and technical input from GRSS.
  • A travel grant of up to USD $2,000 will be provided to one person per winning team to present their results at a special session at IGARSS 2026 in Washington DC, USA.
  • Teams will be invited to submit their research work to JSTARS where their work will undergo the standard review process. Publication fees will be covered by GRSS in case of paper acceptance.
  • A paper summarizing the goal of the 5th IEEE-GRSS SGC and the work conducted by the different teams will be submitted to the Education Section of GRSM.

 

Teams are invited to submit their proposals before November 30, 2024, to: adriano.jose.camps@upc.edu indicating in the subject [5th GRSS Student Grand Challenge]. Proposals will be evaluated by the IEEE/GRSS SGC Steering Committee formed by Prof. A. Camps (UPC-Barcelona Tech, Spain), Prof. P. Gamba (U. Pavia, Italy), Dr. D. Kunkee (The Aerospace Corporation, USA), and Dr. T. Wang (JPL). Results will be announced on the GRSS website and by email to the participants by December 20th, 2024.

After the winners are announced, the main milestones of the project will be:

  • KO meeting (January 2025): all teams present their project, and receive feedback from SGC steering committee.
  • Preliminary Design Review meeting (April 2025): all teams present their selected approaches to conduct the proposed activities, including deviations from the original proposal (if any), tests showing the design trade-offs, and preliminary results of the prototypes, including demonstration of critical technologies or techniques.
  • Critical Design Review meeting (July 2025): all teams present their final designs through complete analyses, simulations with real data that can be obtained operationally, source software code, and test results.
  • Submission of IGARSS 2026 extended abstracts (December 2025-January 2026, exact dates TBA).
  • December 2025 – May 2026: teams conduct field experiments to demonstrate the performance and operations of the system.
  • Final Design Review meeting (May 2026): all teams present tests and demonstrations, that proof that their systems have been successfully implemented and are ready for operations (i.e. not a one-shot demonstration).
  • Submission of IGARSS 2026 final papers (May 2026, exact date TBA).
  • Attendance to IGARSS 2026 (August 2026)
  • Submission of full paper to JSTARS (October 2026)

 

Notes:

  • The IGARSS travel grant and the JSTARS publication fees waiver will be in addition to the up to USD 8,000, but are provided only to teams that commit to the project, attend the progress meetings regularly, and perform successfully.
  • All teams will retain all IP of their developments.
  • Teams that may not be familiar with some of the above terminology are invited to check, for example: www.smartsheet.com/content/design-review-checklist-templates.

 

Background and historical information on GRSS and the GRSS Student Grand Challenge

IEEE GRSS is an international professional IEEE Technical Society that seeks to engage students and young professionals in contributing to the solution of complex engineering problems within the scope of the Student Grand Challenges. IEEE GRSS has sponsored four previous Student Grand Challenges.

The First GRSS Student Grand Challenge focused on the development of end-to-end remote sensing applications based on drones or remotely piloted aircraft systems. Five student teams were selected. Projects included a surveillance system for forest fire detection, a precision agriculture and forest monitoring system, a rice farm mapping system, a system to detect and geolocate disaster survivors, and a system to monitor glaciers. These projects were invited to present their results at IGARSS 2019 in Yokohama, Japan, in a dedicated session:

www.igarss2019.org/Papers/PublicSessionIndex3.asp?Sessionid=1375.

Fig. 1 – Same results of some of the student projects.

The Second GRSS Student Grand Challenge aimed at developing Earth Observation payloads for nanosatellites. This challenge was conducted in collaboration with the National Space Science and Technology Center (NSSTC), Al Ain, United Arab Emirates (UAE). Three student teams were selected from Spain, Indonesia, and Japan. These payloads included an L-band microwave radiometer, a hyperspectral camera, an IoT communications system, an RGB camera with an AI system to discard images covered by clouds. The satellite launch is now scheduled for the second half of 2024. The 3-unit CubeSat and the 3 payloads developed were presented at IGARSS 2023 in Pasadena, USA:

2023.ieeeigarss.org/view_session.php?SessionID=1464 2023.ieeeigarss.org/view_session.php?SessionID=1465

Fig. 2. NSSTC/UAEU’s AlAinSat-1 3-Unit CubeSat being integrated in the ExoPod (Exolaunch premises, Berlin, Germany) on September 4th, 2024. Launch is scheduled for January 2025.

On the right-hand side (1x3U) one can see the hyperspectral camera, the 3-patch antenna array of the L-band microwave radiometer, and the large patch of the LoRa communications system. On the left-hand side (1x1U) one can see the S-band antenna for the communications system also implemented by one of the student teams.

The Third GRSS Student Grand Challenge targeted the detection of marine plastic litter. This challenge was conducted in collaboration with the Van Allen Foundation of the Université de Montpellier (France). Four student teams were selected from France, Spain, Portugal, and the US, using a number of different techniques from GNSS-R to hyperspectral imaging, optical radiometry and lidar fluorescence. Preliminary results were presented by one of the teams at IGARSS 2023 in Pasadena, USA:

2023.ieeeigarss.org/view_paper.php?PaperNum=2041

Figure (a) and Figure (b)

Fig. 3. (a) Picture of the CAPTAIN buoy and microplastic detection sensor
Fig. 3. (b) CAPTAIN buoy deployed in the harbor of Barcelona (Spain), in front of the Institute of Marine Sciences (CSIC) premises.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Fourth GRSS Student Grand Challenge is on going and targeted the development of image processing and classification techniques for the detection and tracking of whales using spaceborne remote sensing data. Five teams from Indonesia, China, India (x2), and Colombia were selected, and will be presenting the results of their projects at a dedicated session in IGARSS 2025 in Brisbane, Australia.