Swift Navigation and Deutsche Telekom announced a partnership to incorporate Swift’s Skylark Cloud Corrections Services within Telekom’s communications infrastructure through its new Precise Positioning product offering. The companies’ joint lane-level accurate Precise Positioning is designed for level 2 and 3 automotive applications including advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) such as lane assist, highway autopilot, cellular vehicle-to-everything (CV2X) communications and lane level directions.
Precise Positioning is a wide-area, cloud-based GNSS corrections service that delivers real-time high-precision positioning to autonomous vehicles. The companies cite <10cm accuracy. The service enables lane-level positioning, fast convergence times and high integrity and availability required by mass market automotive and autonomous applications, according to the announcement.
The Precise Positioning service is currently available across the United States and Germany, with further expansion across Europe underway. It is hardware-independent, allowing customers to choose their GNSS sensor ecosystem. It delivers a continuous stream of multi-constellation, multi-frequency GNSS corrections for a high-availability service that combines lane-level accuracy and integrity at a continental scale.
The technical requirements for Precise Positioning include:
• a dual-band GNSS antenna
• a multi-frequency GNSS receiver
• Mobile network access to the Skylark Corrections Service
• an embedded control unit running Swift Starling software to calculate the exact position from satellite signals and correction data from the cloud.
“We are offering our customers an easy entry into the autonomous future,” said Hagen Rickmann, responsible for business customers at Deutsche Telekom. “We’re not just thinking of self-driving vehicles. The flexible offer is also suitable for use with drones and is even of interest to crane operators on construction sites.”
The partners offer a Precise Positioning Evaluation Kit. This includes two workshops (onboarding and result review), testing hardware and software to connect to the Precise Positioning network for a three-month evaluation period.
