Central Alliance Wins at the RSK Innovation Awards

We are proud to have received the prestigious RSK Innovation Award for New Product and Services, recognising the groundbreaking and innovative application of our UAV-mounted Multiband Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) technology.

Sean Blaney, Technical Director and Adrian Pawsey, Senior Engineer in the Applied Technologies department, received the award for their development of a next-generation remote sensing application that uses UAV-mounted multiband radar and advanced TomoSAR processing to accurately detect and delineate underground voids.

The nomination was based on an animals burrows identification project completed by our Applied Technologies department in February last year for clients, Network Rail and SSE. The project involved airborne, drone-based multiband SAR surveys of railway sections on the Highland Main Line, south of Pitlochry, and near the Scottish Central Mainline, close to Glen Eagles. This included surveys at Bog Wood and Meadow, a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI).

The Surveys formed part of an ecological study of beavers in the local area, which were suspected of burrowing into and under Network Rail infrastructure. An airborne remote sensing inspection method was used to quantify the extent of the burrowing and to assess whether the railway, and the beavers themselves, were in any immediate danger.

Beaver burrows were confirmed at all six surveyed sites, aligning with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) identified hotspots. A further six burrow locations were identified beyond the original study area. The location of the actual burrow chambers may lie within five metres of any identified or marked location. Following investigation, it was also observed that a significant number of collapsed burrows were likely to be linked to recent and frequent flooding events in the area.

The innovation supports several United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) including:

• SDG 9: Industry, Innovation & Infrastructure & SDG 11: Sustainable Cities & Communities – the technology supports safer planning and maintenance of transport corridors, utilities and energy infrastructure, through detection of subsurface voids, abandoned shallow mine workings and ground instabilities.
• SDG 12: Responsible Consumption & Production: by enabling targeted deployment of intrusive investigation only where anomalies are identified, significantly reducing unnecessary site disturbance and improving survey efficiency across large or inaccessible areas.