At OxTS our brand promise is “navigation experts”. Our commitment to our customers is that we will keep innovating until we can help them truly ‘navigate anywhere’ – with or without GNSS. We are taking our products forward in that direction by first enhancing urban navigation data quality.
We know that without accurate positioning and orientation in all environments, many autonomy and surveying applications are impossible to execute to the required level of quality.
Whether it is an ADAS feature validation test on the open road, or a mobile mapping application to create HD maps of an entire city, navigation data is at the heart of ground-truthing and georeferencing applications. Without it our customers would be unable to produce data with centimeter-level absolute accuracy in the global frame, preventing them from going to market with an ADAS feature or selling map data to their own customers.
With our innovation work in 2023 and onwards we plan to offer improved navigation performance on the open road and in dense urban environments, where customers do not get perfect GNSS but require similar levels of accuracy to what we deliver on an automotive proving ground.
Through this work, we will bring our customers closer to the goal of OxTS which is to help them “navigate anywhere” as well as extend our capability to more customers in new applications.
Sensor fusion is at the heart of all of our navigation work. Originally the fusing of GNSS and IMU data gave OxTS the traditional INS product that has served our customers for two decades. The addition of a wheel speed sensor in current applications enables further enhancement to navigation performance but more sensors than ever before are available and have the potential to aid the navigation solution we are offering.
Using sensors with mutually exclusive sensing approaches means that error growth manifests in a way that allows for reliable validation and redundancy. If four sensors agree and one contradicts them, it is an easy decision to reject the outlier. This is often better than using five of the same sensor where the error characteristics are common and so if one suffers a drop in performance based on an event, they all could.
The first step is to pick a sensor with mutually exclusive characteristics to GNSS and IMUs. LiDARs growth in popularity for autonomy and survey applications means that LiDAR sensors are a prime candidate as an aiding sensor due to their increasing performance levels and decreasing cost. The 3D nature of operation means that LiDAR can be used to identify features in a complex environment over time and calculate a velocity vector. This can be used to constrain IMU drift in all axes of velocity through odometry updates, allowing for enhanced dead reckoning in GNSS-denied environments. Pair this with the advanced GNSS processing of OxTS’ gx/ix algorithm and in-house IMU design and the navigation solution becomes much more robust in a GNSS-restricted environment.
If you’re interested in learning more about using sensor fusion to ensure position accuracy in all environments, send us a message at info@oxts.com for a confidential conversation about your project.
All photos: OxTS
This page was produced by North Coast Media’s content marketing staff in collaboration with OxTS. NCM Content Marketing connects marketers to audiences and delivers industry trends, business tips and product information. The GPS World editorial staff did not create this content.
