Projects / From research to product

The need:

One of our clients is an agricultural research institution. As part of our cooperation, we design digital software solutions to implement the research to practical solutions farmers can use. For example, a service to irrigation, or a farmers decision support system etc.

For this case, we took an irrigation optimization study based on open satellite images API. The image processing led to generation of coefficients that is applied to calculate the required field irrigation.

The solution:

The work began with a review of relevant research articles and interviews with researchers.

Based on the collected data, we formulated a pilot task to download images related to a KML polygon and create a full data processing cycle to generate the required coefficients to calculate the irrigation needs.

The pilot included the following stages:

  1. Creation of an online account in a specialized system for accessing satellite images.
  2. Automatic download of zip file with images. This file contains the current period and the KML polygon converted to a rectangle.
  3. Checking uploaded images for processing.
  4. Generating the coefficient.

Once we finished the pilot we had a much better understanding of the business process and focused on writing the requirements to translate research into a digital service.

This was the first service out of many more to come in the future and therefore we generated a defersiation between services that needed to be reused (billing, permissions and download of imagery) and services that are a unique requirement for this service.

Once the requirement was ready with a Figma mockup and pilot we tested before the customer gave the green light to move ahead to the development phase. Our development team took part of the development process.

Business outcome for the company:

The research institute enjoys a digital service that generates income.