For autonomous transport to become a reality, its operations must be at least as safe as existing ones. The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Defence Industry and Space (DG-DEFIS) has awarded mission evolution studies to assess how the future evolution of European GNSS (EGNSS) could be beneficial for innovative and demanding autonomous applications. The new service contract will assess the feasibility of an integrity service complementing EGNSS High Accuracy in the 2030+ timeframe on top of the current baseline of EGNSS services to feed the evolving needs in autonomous transport.
- ICHASE project is led by Thales Alenia Space with the support of FDC, Université Gustave Eiffel, GEA Space, know.space;
- ITHACA project is led by GMV with the support of TNO, VVA and GMV-NSL.
The two projects are part of Horizon 2020, a financial instrument implementing the Innovation Union, aimed at securing Europe’s global competitiveness.
The various partners will analyze the feasibility of an integrity service complementing European GNSS (EGNSS) High Accuracy in the 2030+ timeframe to feed the evolving needs in demanding new applications without disrupting the current business models of established service providers. The studies will assess the respective merits of various directions for the Galileo and EGNOS services to evolve and to build the steps needed before the operational introduction of such new services.
Thales Alenia Space will focus on the development of a new approach to sensors fusion including and complementing evolutions of EGNSS High Accuracy to provide high reliability and high accuracy positioning in road autonomous vehicles and autonomous transport in maritime and rail sectors, according to the company. This could entail an extension of previous work by Thales Alenia Space, assessing the extension of aviation integrity and safety of life services for road tolls and insurance (the EPICURE project), as well as the IMPRESS project targeting an integrity service for rail signalling and train separation.
Thales Alenia Space is prime contractor for the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS).
