Working where others go on holiday: A very special form of this workation motto is taking our experts Alexander and Pascal across Europe this week. The plan: to demonstrate live how precisely the position of a vehicle can be determined with our technology Precise Positioning (the name says it all) can be determined (an important prerequisite for autonomous driving, for example). You can follow their adventure every day here in the blog.
We got the idea for this tour through Europe from Swift Navigation, Deutsche Telekom's technology partner for Precise Positioning. The San Francisco-based company controls its cloud service Skylark, which provides correction data for satellite navigation. In 2019, Swift drove a test vehicle from San Francisco to New York to put Precise Positioning to the test in everyday life. And that is exactly what we are now recreating in Europe.
To this end, we worked with the teams at Deutsche Telekom Group Partnering & Devices (GPD) and Deutsche Funkturm (DFMG) teamed up with our colleagues from Telekom Mobility Solutions borrowed a smart estate car and packed it to the brim with technology.
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We set off from Hanover in the morning, with a whopping 680 kilometres ahead of us to Kreuzlingen, the largest Swiss town on Lake Constance. On this first day of our tour, it's all about covering a lot of ground - because it's obvious that precise positioning already works very well in Germany: not only are most of our reference stations located here (see info box), but also more than 80,000 mobile phone antennas, for example, which can provide 80 million people (95 per cent of the population) with 5G.
We have 570 kilometres ahead of us, including two Alpine crossings and a detour via Milan to Chamonix in France. After a short drive, we make our first stop: we need a toll sticker for Switzerland.
Crossing the Gotthard road tunnel, which is almost 17 kilometres long, puts our system to the test for the first time. But here, too, it becomes clear: thanks to Precise Positioning, our station wagon can be precisely localised on the monitor.
Not everything goes so smoothly in the car itself: shortly after the tunnel, we realise that we have lost the power supply to our test setup. The GNSS receivers were still being supplied by the backup battery, but the GNSS recorder has its own backup battery, which has already run out. The cause turned out to be the cigarette lighter fuse. Replacing the defective fuse is only a temporary solution: the now extremely high charging current of the empty backup batteries overloads the fuse of the cigarette lighter and trips it again after a short time. So we have to change our plans and decide to connect the recorder directly to the vehicle battery and only continue to supply the test setup via the cigarette lighter. We also had to replace the plug of the test set-up as it had not withstood the heat and had melted, which also caused a high resistance. After two hours of work, blocking three parking spaces and plenty of sceptical looks, we have all the systems up and running again and can continue our journey.
During the late lunch break at Lago di Como, we reward ourselves with a traditional pizza. We see seaplanes taking off from the harbour - our spirits rise again. Then it's back to the Alps: we cross the border between Italy and France in the Tunnel du Mont Blanc, which is almost twelve kilometres long. The tunnel has been extensively redesigned for safety after the 1999 accident. We are given information cards on what to do in the event of unexpected incidents, speed and distance are precisely regulated and signposted several times, and it costs a hefty 52 euros to drive through.
We set off early to take the spectacular cable car up to the Mont Blanc plateau Aiguille du Midi at 3,842 metres. In vain: the wind is blowing at 150 km/h up here and the cable car is out of service today. Interim conclusion: the Alps don't like us very much.
Setting off for Port Vendres in France, just before the Spanish border. Almost 700 kilometres lie ahead of us. The route leads over serpentines into the French lowlands, where we head towards the Cote d'Azure on the usual good motorways of the "Route de Soleil". Temperatures are up to 35 degrees. Lunch break in Valence, another pizza (which surprisingly tastes much better than the one we had the day before in Italy).
Technically, everything runs smoothly: Neither the high mountains nor the hairpin bends or the journey through various mobile phone cells cause our measuring system any headaches. Our Telekombi not only stays on track on the road, but also on the monitor. Once we arrive in Port Vendres on the Mediterranean, we cool off in the rooftop pool before heading to the fishing harbour and rounding off the evening at a small harbour festival with live music.
Theoretically, we only have 200 kilometres to go to our destination in Barcelona. However, we decide to take the coastal road, which gives us an extra 40 kilometres or so, but offers a few beautiful village crossings instead of the dreary motorway. After a lunch stop at the harbour in Badalona with a black paella mixta, we arrive at our destination in Barcelona in the late afternoon. Here it became clear that even the high level of development in city centres has no negative impact on the accuracy of the Precise Positioning System.
At the end of the tour, of course, we can't miss the must-see tourist programme: a visit to the Sagrada Familia, which is still undergoing restoration, an exploration of La Rambla with its numerous shops, bars and sights, and a fish restaurant with excellent ray. We end our last evening at the hotel's sky bar with a view of the colourfully illuminated Torre Glories. Tomorrow we hand in the car and unfortunately fly back to Hanover.
And what comes next? Over the next few weeks, various departments will be busy evaluating, comparing, analysing and assessing all the data. So it will be a while before we can present you with a detailed technical report - but one thing is already clear to both of us: Precise Positioning has completely convinced us in the practical test on our tour across Europe!
The solution Precise Positioning enables, as the name suggests, an extremely precise determination of the position of vehicles - or even drones and robots, e-scooters and lawnmowers, pallets and containers, etc. While conventional navigation via GPS (Global Positioning System) can be several metres inaccurate, Precise Positioning is accurate to within two centimetres (Skylark RTK). To achieve this, a comprehensive network of Deutsche Telekom reference stations on several continents measures local interference in GNSS satellite navigation (Global Navigation Satellite System; this includes the US service GPS as well as the European Galileo). A cloud-based service from the Deutsche Telekom partner Swift Navigation sends the corrected position data to the vehicle via mobile radio.
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Christian has been working in various marketing positions at Deutsche Telekom for several years. Both professionally and privately, he describes himself as a digitalization enthusiast and is convinced that anything that can be connected, will be connected in the future.He is passionate about the IoT (Internet of Things) and writes on our blog about a wide variety of applications in the areas of energy management, sustainability, smart connected products, and much more.
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