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Tag: Geoflex

  • Joint venture expands SBAS for business development in Africa

    Joint venture expands SBAS for business development in Africa

    A team of companies and government agencies is developing satellite services provided by ASECNA’s A-SBAS (Satellite-Based Augmentation System) for Africa and the Indian Ocean. Besides the current SBAS, the joint venture will deliver precise point positioning (PPP, through CNES and Geoflex) and danger warnings for a wide range of applications in Africa.

    Working together are the Agency for Air Navigation Safety in Africa and Madagascar (ASECNA), Nigerian Communications Satellite Ltd. (NIGCOMSAT) and Thales Alenia Space, the joint venture between Thales (67%) and Leonardo (33%). The project is backed by Geoflex, a provider of cloud services that deliver improvements to GPS/GNSS applications to achieve positioning accuracy to within 4 centimeters on land, at sea and in the air.

    The new SBAS services are expected to aid agriculture and other sectors in Africa. Here,volcanic cinder cones and farming in rich volcanic soils on the border of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda. (Photo: iStock/Getty Images Plus)
    The new SBAS services are expected to aid agriculture and other sectors in Africa. Here,volcanic cinder cones and farming in rich volcanic soils on the border of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda. (Photo: iStock/Getty Images Plus)

    Demonstrations

    The three partners successfully demonstrated the additional services on July 7 and 8 in Brazzaville, Congo, by calling on the SBAS signal they have broadcast over the Africa and Indian Ocean (AFI) region since September 2020 to provide the first SBAS open service in this part of the world via the NigComSat-1R satellite. This trial follows successful flight demonstrations this year in Lomé in January and Douala in June.

    The first demonstration of the special urgent situation warning service via satellite showed the system’s ability to broadcast a warning message via the A-SBAS signal to mobile phones, without requiring a terrestrial network. This service sends a message to the populations concerned, providing information on the type of danger and instructions to be followed.

    The second demonstration entailed the transmission of GNSS corrections based on CNES/Geoflex PPP technology and also using the A-SBAS signal. This approach showed the system’s ability to achieve positioning accuracy to within centimeters across the entire African continent.

    The new satellite service paves the way for applications in a broad range of sectors, including precision agriculture, land and maritime transport, rail safety, drone navigation, mapping and surveying. The ASECNA SBAS was developed as part of the ‘’SBAS for Africa & Indian Ocean’’ programme as a first step towards providing robust navigation services in the aviation sector.

    ASECNA’s 18 Member States are Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Comoros, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, France, Gabon, Guinea Bissau, Equatorial Guinea, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Chad and Togo.

  • Geoflex cloud-based geolocation company honored with award

    Geoflex cloud-based geolocation company honored with award

    Geoflex logoGeoflex, a geolocation company, won the Jury Award of SPRING 50, a competition of deep tech startups that took place on May 20 in Paris-Saclay, the largest French research cluster, located south of Paris.

    Geoflex is a cloud service operator that enhances GPS/GNSS-based applications to provide 4-centimeter positioning on land, at sea and in the air.

    Geoflex was initially selected among the 10 most promising companies within the 50 startups promoted at the event. All 10 startups founders were subsequently showcasing their companies in a 4 minutes pitch, and Geoflex’s CEO Romain Legros won this last leg of the competition.

    Geoflex’s hyper-geolocation service has been available globally since 2018. The service, which corrects inherent GNSS inaccuracies, is provided in real time or in post processing. It works across all types of GNSS hardware receivers and includes correction data for all constellations: GPS, GLONASS, Galileo and BeiDou and for all their frequencies.

    The technology was initially developed by the French space agency CNES in a 12-year research project. It is protected by seven patents licensed to Geoflex, which continues co-development of the technology with the CNES.

    Geoflex also has developed a positioning engine that includes sensor fusion with other technologies such as inertial, optical and communications. A hardware development kit is available.

  • CNES and Geoflex sign agreement on satellite positioning

    French Space Agency CNES has signed a cooperation agreement with the company Geoflex, granting it the right to spin off software developed by CNES that employs satellite precise point positioning (PPP) technology.

    Under the agreement, CNES is granting Geoflex a license to use its patented technologies in this field with a view to offering a global commercial operational service. This partnership ties in with the agency’s strategy of spinning off its research and development results.

    The agreement was signed June 28 at the Toulouse Space Show by Lionel Suchet, CNES’s director of innovation, applications and science, and Romain Legros, chairman of Geoflex.

    The Geoflex team was able to draw on more than 10 years’ experience in GNSS precise positioning when they founded their start-up to pursue this project. Through this cooperation agreement with CNES, Geoflex is set to benefit from significant opportunities worldwide in real-time precise positioning, navigation and timing, serving a broad customer base employing applications such as topographic mapping, construction and civil engineering, agriculture, shipping, rail, driverless vehicles and unmanned aerial systems.

    “Today’s space technologies will drive revolutionary changes in usage in the future,” Suchet said after signing the agreement. “Through their commitment to developing a global GNSS precise positioning service, CNES and Geoflex are showing that France has a key role to play in innovating and in growing our future economy. The people at this start-up are looking to shake up the status quo, so it was natural that CNES should support them.”