Integrity is integral to precision agriculture

The Trektor hybrid robot for agriculture, made by the French company SITIA, can work on a variety of crops by changing the width of its wheelbase and can perform many repetitive tasks, such as spraying and hoeing. (Image: SITIA)

Precision agriculture has been around for more than 30 years and now covers the majority of U.S. farmland. It refers to the ability of farmers to observe, measure and respond precisely to the variability of soil and crop characteristics within and between fields by using maps of these characteristics and GNSS navigation. It enables them to reduce inputs of seed, water, fertilizer, pesticides and fuel while increasing outputs. It also enables them to work at night and in the fog and automate many functions at large feed lots.

For precision agriculture, GNSS integrity can mean the difference between, say, a robot protecting a vineyard by weeding and spraying pesticides or damaging it by straying onto the vines.

Autonomous Tractors, Mowers, and Feed Monitors

SITIA, a French company, has developed an autonomous tractor that is used by, among others, an organic vineyard in France’s Loire valley to tirelessly weed the narrow rows between the grape vines — compensating for the movement of young workers to cities. Thanks to the high accuracy and integrity of the Septentrio GNSS heading receiver inside, the autonomous tractor has decreased the damage to the vineyards by more than an order of magnitude compared to the traditional work done by a farmer with a manual tractor.

Renu Robotics, based in San Antonio, Texas, makes a robot for vegetation management, called Renubot. It uses machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence, to plan its route, optimize its energy consumption, perform self-diagnostics, collect environmental data and assess the topography that it traverses.

Navigation is based on a stored map of paths, a Septentrio RTK GPS receiver and sensors to avoid obstacles. A radio link enables the Renubot to communicate with a control center, for reporting and updates. When the Renubot returns to its recharge pod, it charges its lithium battery and performs updates and downloads.

Manabotix Pty. Ltd., an Australian company, has developed an automated system to monitor cattle in large feedlots, using GNSS, lidar scanning and other vision or perception technologies and artificial intelligence. This has greatly improved the accuracy and consistency of feedlot volume estimates, which for the previous 150 years had been the responsibility of a select few employees, who would visually gauge the amount of feed in concrete troughs. This visual inspection by humans was inherently imprecise, subjective, and inconsistent, often causing animals to eat too much or too little one day and get off their optimal growth curve or even become ill. Manabotix’s solution consists of a Septentrio AsteRx-U GNSS receiver and antenna, a lidar scanner, and an onboard processing platform.

Statistical Analysis

Integrity is a key aspect of all these applications. A part of delivering integrity is a statistical analysis called receiver autonomous integrity monitoring (RAIM), which was developed for such safety-critical applications as aviation or marine navigation. A refinement of RAIM, called RAIM+, takes this analysis to the next level as part of a larger positioning protection package.

For autonomous operation, it can be particularly hazardous to be overly optimistic about GNSS accuracy. This parameter is reported in the form of positioning uncertainty, which is the maximum possible error on the calculated position. It is especially necessary in challenging GNSS environments, where the receiver has a direct line of sight to only a limited number of GNSS satellites or where GNSS signals are degraded. RAIM alerts users when their receiver’s uncertainty strays beyond the limits they have chosen for their application.

Users can be deceived by a consistent position or movement — which can be consistently inaccurate. The positioning uncertainty gives them an indication of the extent to which they can rely on their receiver’s positioning accuracy at any given moment. The receiver operator can set an alarm limit, so that the receiver can flag situations when positioning uncertainty becomes too large.

The blue line in Figure 1 shows position uncertainty estimated by a GNSS receiver under favorable conditions, when the view of the sky is unobstructed, and the receiver has a direct line-of-sight to many satellites.

Figure 1. Under good GNSS conditions, the position uncertainty shown by the blue lines is well within the alarm limits, indicating safe operation. The actual position of the receiver should always remain within the blue uncertainty boundaries. (Image: Septentrio)

During favorable conditions, the positioning uncertainty stays well below the alarm limit because the calculated position is almost the same as the robot’s actual position. However, in challenging environments, the truthfulness of positioning uncertainty becomes most critical (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. In challenging environments receivers with high integrity report large positioning uncertainty, flagging possible inaccuracies to the system. If the receiver is too optimistic about its accuracy, the operation becomes hazardous. (Image: Septentrio)

For instance, when the view of the sky is partially obstructed by buildings or foliage, the receiver has access to only a limited number of GNSS satellites, making it harder to calculate accurate position. In such cases the receiver must report a higher positioning uncertainty, so that the system can take adequate action such as switching to lower speeds, staying further away from predefined boundaries, or stopping.

A low integrity receiver may keep reporting an optimistic positioning uncertainty, that stays below the preset alarm limit even when the calculated position is way off from the actual position. The number may look fine, but effectively it becomes a “robot on the loose,” no longer on its planned path with a risk of damaging itself and its surroundings.

Let us look at uncertainty limits in action during a GNSS car test in an urban canyon, where the view of the sky is partially obstructed by houses (see Figure 3). The orange lines are the positioning and its uncertainty boundaries reported by a Septentrio mosaic GNSS module in the car, while the red lines are the positioning and its uncertainty boundaries reported by another popular GNSS receiver. The white line shows the actual position of the car as it drives along the road. The orange uncertainty boundaries of the mosaic receiver are truthful and somewhat wider in this challenging environment, and you can see that the actual position always remains within these boundaries. On the other hand, the red trajectory jumps off course in a certain challenging spot on the road, with the actual position no more within the uncertainty boundaries, which remain too optimistic. In this case the competitor’s receiver gives a false sense of security and the system is unaware of its hazardous operation.

Figure 3. In an urban canyon car test the Septentrio receiver reports truthful position uncertainty. A competitor receiver seems to be more accurate, while the actual position is not even within its reported uncertainty boundaries. (Image: Septentrio)

If the receiver depicted by the red line provided navigational information for an ADAS automotive system, for example, this could mislead the system into thinking that the car switched lanes. If the system then attempted to correct the trajectory by switching back to the “correct lane” this would result in taking the car off course and potentially hitting the sidewalk or even another car.

RAIM vs RAIM+

The underlying mechanism behind truthful positioning uncertainty reporting is RAIM, which ensures a truthful positioning calculation based on statistical analysis and exclusion of any outlier satellites or signals. Septentrio receivers are designed for high integrity and take RAIM to the next level with RAIM+, guaranteeing truthfulness of positioning with a high degree of confidence.

In Septentrio receivers RAIM+ is a component of a larger receiver protection suite called GNSS+ comprising positioning protection on various levels including AIM+ anti-jamming and anti-spoofing, IONO+ resilience to ionospheric scintillations, and APME+ multipath mitigation.

Septentrio has fine-tuned its RAIM+ statistical model with more than 50 terabytes of field data collected over 20 years. It removes satellites and signals which may give errors due to multipath reflection, solar ionospheric activity, jamming and spoofing, while working together with the GNSS+ components mentioned above. Because of this multi-component protection architecture, it achieves a very high level of positioning accuracy and reliability which goes well beyond the standard RAIM. The RAIM+ statistical model is adaptive, highly detailed, and complete, taking advantage of all available GNSS constellations and signals. The full RAIM+ functionality is also available in Septentrio’s GNSS/INS receiver line. User controlled parameters allow it to be tuned to specific requirements.

The diagram in Figure 4 shows RAIM+ in action during a jamming and spoofing attack on a Septentrio GNSS receiver. While AIM+ removes the effects of GNSS jamming, both AIM+ and RAIM+ work together to block the spoofing attack. Satellites with high distance errors, shown on the middle graph, are removed by RAIM+ since they do not conform to the expected satellite distance.

Figure 4. In this scenario jamming gives satellite distance errors but is countered by AIM+ technology. During spoofing AIM+ eliminates some of the spoofed satellites, while other satellites that have wrong distances are dismissed by RAIM+ algorithms. (Image: Septentrio)

This example shows that even in the case of jamming and spoofing, Septentrio’s high integrity receiver technology delivers truthful and reliable positioning on which any autonomous system can count.

GNSS Design Around Reliability

GNSS receivers designed to be reliable strive for high integrity in both reporting of the positioning uncertainty as well as in RAIM+ advanced statistical modelling. This ensures that these receivers provide truthful and timely warning messages and are resilient in various challenging environments. Other technologies such as inertial navigation system (INS) can also be coupled to the GNSS receiver to extend positioning availability even during short GNSS outages. Quality indicators for satellite signals, CPU status, base-station quality and overall quality allow monitoring of positioning reliability at any given time. High-integrity GNSS receivers provide truthful positioning in autonomous machines such as the SITIA weeding tractor. They are also crucial components in safety-critical applications, assured PNT and any other application where accuracy and reliability matters.