Industry-driven consortium paves the way for fully autonomous systems

Autonomous vehicles, drones, machines, and other automated systems rely on sensors to accurately locate themselves in their environments. Whilst today's autonomous systems predominantly rely on absolute position data for navigation, future applications will also employ it to share sensor data with other systems and the infrastructure. Furthermore, accurate absolute positioning will have a growing role in evaluating and testing autonomous systems and collecting training data to develop AI and ML algorithms.

Autonomous systems will potentially be crucial for developing flexible, scalable airports with optimised and seamless flows of passengers, goods, and data and highly secured and robust facilities to provide safe travelling. Allowing them will demand precise and reliable positioning and continuous connectivity through digital infrastructure – the focus topics of the DINPAS project.

GNSS delivers a key technology for absolute positioning, meeting industry cost, accuracy, and availability needs. They do so by using correction information from a GNSS reference network, which can be efficiently allocated to support wide-ranging use cases and extensive numbers of devices globally utilising an open and interoperable data format and efficient mobile network operator distribution defined by the cellular standards organisation 3GPP.

Funded by the Vinnova program "Advanced and Innovative Digital Infrastructure," DINPAS, short for Digital Infrastructure enabling accurate Positioning for Autonomous Systems, strives to evaluate the needs of future autonomous airports in terms of reliable, precise positioning and scalability to considerable numbers of devices, to aid the next generation of industrial digital solutions. The targeted implementation, including software for generating corrections, 3GPP-based delivery, and navigation device, will assess relevant performance.

The DINPAS-consortium is an industry-wide cooperation between research institutes, the telecom industry, telecom operator, and small and medium-sized companies and consists of RISE, AstaZero, Combitech, Ericsson IBG, Katla Aero, Lantmäteriet, Telia, and u-blox.