Swift Navigation expands Skylark precise positioning for autonomous vehicles

Image: Swift Navigation

Skylark is now available across the contiguous United States, enabling safe and lane-level accurate positioning.

Swift ​​Navigation’s network-connected Skylark precise positioning service is now available throughout the United States. Full contiguous U.S. (CONUS) coverage reduces initialization times to seconds, ensuring high-accuracy, high-integrity positioning is available when customers need it.

Swift ​​Navigation is ​​a San Francisco-based tech firm providing centimeter-accurate GNSS positioning technology for autonomous vehicles, and the maker of the Piksi Multi and Duro GNSS receivers.

Skylark is built for autonomy at scale and delivers lane-level precision, with safety-of-life integrity, required by mass-market automotive and autonomous applications. Skylark is a scalable network delivering a continuous stream via the cloud of robust, reliable, multi-constellation, multi-frequency corrections, with the latency, security, precision and reliability required for safety and autonomy.

“Since Skylark was introduced last year, the Swift network team has been hard at work deploying infrastructure across the country,” said Rob Hranac, COO of Swift Navigation. “This extensive network helps remove hurdles in precise positioning for our customers and we look forward to partnering with those customers as we expand Skylark internationally.”

Skylark is designed to address the needs of automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) by supporting ASIL-rated (Automotive Safety Integrity Level) systems and Ntrip2 (Networked Transport of RTCM via Internet Protocol) connections in cloud reference station (CRS) mode. It is state space representation (SSR) ready — an emerging industry format.

Skylark is hardware-independent, giving customers a choice in today’s rapidly improving and commodifying the GNSS sensor ecosystem. OEMs are able to benefit from the lane-level positioning Skylark delivers using a host of third-party receivers in addition to Swift’s Piksi Multi and Duro receivers.

Unlike legacy real-time-kinematic (RTK) services designed for smaller regions and precise point positioning (PPP) services that suffer from slow convergence times, Skylark is a high-performance hybrid nationwide U.S. network that delivers initialization times in seconds, better than 10 centimeters of accuracy and integrity required by the most demanding safety-of-life critical applications.

When used with Swift’s Starling positioning engine, Skylark is capable of delivering protection levels (PL) down to 1 meter and target integrity risk (TIR) down to 10^-7/hour. Engineered for automotive functional safety standard ISO 26262 (ASIL B), Skylark is designed and built from the ground up to support next-generation GNSS applications, connected car, V2X and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS).

Skylark packages GNSS precise positioning as an affordable subscription service for ease in deployment for large-scale autonomous vehicle fleets.