The Barcelona’s town hall has incorporated the use of drones to improve effectiveness and efficiency in the management of the beaches and bathing areas of Barcelona and estimate the capacity, in real time, of users on the beaches during high season.
Barcelona City Council, the Municipal Institute of Informatics and BIT Habitat have signed a collaboration agreement that, within the framework of the Barcelona Urban Innovation Laboratory, wants to promote the use of drone technology to improve the management of public spaces and adopt innovative solutions that respond to needs that the different areas of Barcelona City Council consider could potentially be resolved with this technological solution.
It is within this framework that the council has put out to public tender the contract that should allow this service to be contracted, for the summer, consisting of obtaining images and video using drone technology to improve the effectiveness and efficiency in the management of the coastline of the municipality of Barcelona.
900 expected hours
Thanks to this contract, the capacity monitoring service on Barcelona’s beaches will have an update regular capacity every 1.5 hours during the busiest hours in high season (from 11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.), so that by the end of the beach season, more than 900 hours of drone operation will have been accumulated.
As indicated by the city council, the project will also serve to study the application of drones in other activities of public interest and test new capacity control systems in musical shows and outdoor recreational activities.
The third deputy mayor, Laia Bonet, has highlighted that with this pilot test they launch the digital innovation model and technology testing they want for the city: “that it responds to real urban needs, that it has public leadership in facilitating spaces for technological testing, and that it respects the digital rights (privacy and data control) of citizens”.
This project will be one of the first initiatives of the Barcelona Urban Innovation Laboratory, which is managed by the municipal foundation BIT Hàbitat, a service that will be operational throughout 2022 and that will allow, on the one hand, to provide the Barcelona City Council with the testing of innovative solutions aimed at urban needs, and, on the other hand, offering companies and entities the possibility of testing pre-commercial phase solutions in real environments.
test expandable
As indicated by the city council, the project will also serve to study the application of drones in other activities of public interest and test new capacity control systems in musical shows and outdoor recreational activities.
In the summer of 2021, Barcelona City Council carried out a proof of concept to study the feasibility and suitability of using drone technology to manage access to beaches, which offered “optimal results” according to the council.
This summer goes one step further with a pilot project that allows evaluating the intensive use of drones to capture and process the information necessary to manage access to Barcelona’s coastal beaches.
freedom of the people
According to the municipal statement, the will is for “drone technology to become the main means of obtaining the information necessary to order the coastline and to be able, in the future, to convert the pilot project into a regular public service.”
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In order to guarantee the safeguarding the rights and freedom of peopleand in accordance with the methodology established by the Catalan Data Protection Authority, the real-time image processing system anonymizes them in the same generation process and eliminates the originals immediately afterwards.
The system that is put into practice on the beaches, once all the images that make up a beach have been processed, proceeds to add the capacity per image to obtain the total capacity, without there being, in any case, recognition of people.