Lockheed Martin, Uralla TT and C Satellite Tracking Station hosted a visit by UNE Business School staff with Professor David Lamb as part of the University of Wyoming’s recent visit to UNE and Armidale.

The Wyoming students were here as part of a week-long visit to Armidale and the New England, taking in local cultural experiences, meeting agribusiness service providers and hearing from local producers. The role of data in the future of agribusiness and agtech was a focus point of discussions out at Lockheed Martin.

Dane McCormack of Lockheed Martin’s Business Growth and Execution team spoke with UNE Professor David Lamb, director of the Precision Agriculture Group, about their mutual interest in the Second-Generation Satellite-Based Augmentation System (SBAS) project.

SBAS is working on technology that will enable civilian satellite navigation systems to provide positioning information within centimetres of accuracy. By improving accuracy from metres to tens of centimetres, SBAS will open up new possibilities in areas like agriculture (which has become reliant on autosteer systems), self-driving cars, and position-dependent smartphone apps.

Students from UNE’s School of Science and Technology Liam Carney and Nathan Mark, both studying a Bachelor of Computer Science, took the opportunity to accompany our Wyoming visitors on this trip as well, leveraging their recent experience at UNE SMART Region Incubator’s Agmentation event to consider the possibilities of data collected at Lockheed Martin’s facility.