Future Mobility: Precise Positioning Takes You There

The Estonian company Auve Tech has specialized in making driverless vehicles and autonomous systems ever since it was founded in 2019. Until recently it relied entirely on LiDAR technology for its self-propelled buses. Auve Tech shuttles used it to recognize their surroundings and calculate their position in order to identify obstacles early. But the technology is cost-intensive and susceptible to external influences such as bad weather. For additional assistance the company has now equipped its shuttles with a Precise Positioning GNSS module (PGM).

Precise Positioning from Telekom and Swift Navigation now adds corrections to GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) positioning data. Swift Navigation’s Starling positioning technology and Skylark Cloud-based correction service enable precise positioning to within four centimeters. The correction service uses a network of hundreds of measuring stations on several continents to identify local satellite navigation inaccuracies. Test runs by the company have shown that the PGM sensor system and the Skylark correction service facilitate secure and accurate positioning in autonomous navigation and thus ideally supplement the existing LiDar technology. So the satellite-assisted IoT technology Precise Positioning can be used as a standalone autonomous driving solution.

IoT and Precise Positioning can also help improve road safety for vehicles with a human driver at the wheel. The French startup Smartmoov uses Precise Positioning to help learner drivers and driving instructors. It has developed an automatic monitoring and analysis solution that observes the driver’s behavior and helps make roads safer. Dashboard cameras inside and outside the vehicle record driving lessons. This is also a solution insurance companies can use to better assess the risk that an insured motorist poses.

To analyze and optimize driver behavior supplements the video material is supplemented by precise location data. To provide it Smartmoov has equipped the dashboard cameras with the PGM module. Thanks to the Skylark correction service the driving school cars can be located to within four centimeters and information is supplied on how well they keep to their lane. After every lesson an artificial intelligence report on the driver’s behavior is compiled. Thanks to Precise Positioning Smartmoov is thereby able to establish where the most frequent mistakes are made and driving schools can respond by initiating road safety and accident prevention measures.

With the aid of this IoT technology companies can make their driverless vehicles and autonomous systems safer. GNSS positioning on its own is not accurate enough for autonomous navigation, but Precise Positioning enables companies to benefit from a much greater degree of accuracy, while the correction service makes even minor positioning errors a thing of the past. And the Cloud-based IoT application is scalable for an unlimited number of autonomous vehicles. For future mobility that means maximum safety in autonomous road traffic, not to mention the fact that the environment and other industries, such as agriculture, stand to benefit from the IoT technology.