Sutton High School: Royal Society Partnership Extension Grant 2024

Partnering with Cambridge University Space Flight, Launch Access Ltd, Amazon Web Services (AWS), NASA DEVELOP and NASA Earth Science Data Systems, GDST Sutton High School's first stage Royal Society STEM Partnership project grant involved an investigation into aerial image and sensor data collection from remote airborne devices, for cloud computing-based machine learning processing. In the case of imagery, the goal is to carry out image recognition in aerial images via computer vision algorithms, and in the case of air quality sensor data, the goal is to automate predicative regressions, so to draw environmental conclusions following its correlation with existing NASA Earth satellite data covering the same local areas over the last few decades.

2024 has brought Sutton High School a new partnership opportunity with Cranfield University CranSEDS. The Royal Society awarded Sutton High School with a 2024 Extension to their STEM Partnership agreement, to extend the provisions of their existing student-generated airborne payload (onboard sensor and camera instruments) built with first STEM partner ​Cambridge University ​Space Flight​

Furthering its development from surviving the atmospheric heights of high-altitude balloon deployment and velocities of rocket thrust, new ventures will tailor their imager payload toward more complex integration with a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) drone aircraft. Newly built by the postgraduate engineering students at Cranfield University, the drone has been tested to embrace impacts of sustained windspeed ahead of its next stages of solar powering and automated aerial navigation.

Moving forward with the development of our payload, which was originally designed to be carried by a model rocket and high-altitude balloon, they are now wanting the steady and controlled ability to collect aerial image data for computer vision processing AI. ​In the first instance, the aim is to recognise trees in the images, however one day, hopefully of smaller Arctic icebergs that cannot be picked up by satellite imagers.