Who is MicroPilot? For almost anyone in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) electronics — or, rather, avionics — MicroPilot is probably a familiar name. The company makes the autopilots that basically fly the vehicle. An autopilot is the business-end of the navigation guidance system on a UAV. It takes input from sensors — typically GPS, air data, and inertial/gyro, which can be internal or external to the autopilot — and provides signals that adjust the flight controls to null out errors between the planned flight track and the actual flight profile that the UAV is flying.
A typical UAV autopilot uses GPS/inertial/air data to generate position information for route and waypoint navigation as well as hold modes where altitude and heading are maintained. In addition, it will accept commands from a remote ground-control station to modify the waypoints and route, to go to a specific waypoint, or to land, circle or fly a particular pattern. Telemetry data is also sent to the ground station to monitor status and flight progress. The autopilot acts as a central point within the UAV, communicating to and controlling onboard equipment such as pan-tilt cameras and transponders. The autopilot is also responsible for handling a variety of error conditions, such as loss of communication link or GPS.
MicroPilot was started 20 years ago by Howard Loewen, who is the sole owner and CEO. A licensed pilot, Loewen decided to make a model plane fly all by itself. With a bunch of aero textbooks, a couple of model airplanes, a single-board computer, gyros and a GPS receiver, he basically taught himself how aircraft fly and how to model (simulate) an aircraft. He developed autopilot software and a basic six-degree-of-freedom (DOF) simulator. Linking the simulator software to the autopilot software, he could test fly the autopilot on his PC. This same architecture is still in use at MicroPilot today and enables much more efficient development and testing of autopilot systems.
After many thousands of hours of simulated flight, actual flight testing was, at first, quite difficult for him to master. However, he gained lots of experience during a successful flight test campaign. Then Loewen put together a web page describing what he was doing. Not too long after the web page went live, the phone began to ring, and not long after the phone calls started, orders began to come in. MicroPilot wasn’t the only company selling autopilots at that time, but it may be the only one from that time that is still around.
The company staff jointly decided that they should focus on the high-end commercial UAV market, so there had to be significant investment in production and development processes. Early on, an automated sensor calibration system was developed, which has recently been upgraded to use a two-axis rotating temperature chamber. This system allows MicroPilot to load up a couple dozen autopilots, and a few hours later fully calibrated and tested autopilots emerge! So, peak demand is readily accommodated, and MicroPilot staff is able to focus on product and process improvement rather than on labor-intensive manual testing.
The professional market is a more challenging customer base because customers fly much more expensive vehicles. While there is currently a lot of focus on low-cost hobby autopilots, these are seen as an interim step until there are proper regulations. In the end, UAVs are aviation products, and for many applications they require a high level of reliability and availability. No one is going to be flying 55-pound helicopters over a city without an autopilot that has undergone vigorous validation and verification processes. MicroPilot autopilots have a large number of options that enable configuration of the control system for the type of vehicle — for instance, fixed wing, multi-rotor, helicopter, or aerostat/blimp. Once the type of vehicle has been selected, the gains of the various feedback loops that control the vehicle are configured. There are also quite a few options for payloads and other onboard devices such as transponders and cameras.
MicroPilot is based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. The city is large enough to have a pool of talented engineering and computer science graduates. While the winter climate can be quite harsh, the city is not so large that there is much trouble finding a place to test fly. The MicroPilot facilities are about six miles outside the city, and the staff is able to test fly right outside their building under a Transport Canada special flight operations certificate. MicroPilot has 27 employees, ships in the order of 1,000 autopilots per year, and has 850 customers in 70 countries.
Regulation is the key to moving the commercial UAV market forward — a huge market is already flying sophisticated, expensive sensor payloads over cities. Even a moderate-size Multirotor UAV poses some safety risks, and it is important that regulators quickly devise rules to allow safe flight of these sensors over populated areas. MicroPilot has been working on improving its product offerings so that when regulations finally appear, the company will have products with the right capability and implemented correctly, so regulators should be able to readily establish that its products are safe. To this end, the first triple-redundant autopilot was introduced four or five years ago. It is still the only triple-redundant UAV autopilot available. Triple redundancy implies that two out of three channels could totally fail, and no failure will carry over from one channel to another, so autopilot functionality for the vehicle would still be maintained.
trueHWIL is a high-fidelity simulator that MicroPilot has developed where the sensors are stripped from the autopilot and the sensor inputs are simulated electrically. The simulator also reads control-position information from the autopilot. Under this simulator, the autopilot receives sensor data as if it is in the air. The code paths that the autopilot software executes are identical to those in a real autopilot in flight. Customers use this tool to build “iron-bird” simulations of the vehicle on the ground to validate the configuration prior to flight. It enables week-long or longer instrumented flight tests to be performed that would be difficult or dangerous to perform in real life.
trueHWIL high fidelity simulator. Photo: Micropilot
Finally, the xtender validate product has been developed. This requirements capture system allows customers to link system requirements to autopilot or ground control system (GCS) settings. It also allows the system designers to develop electronic flight-test cards linked to requirements. After flight test, the resulting data logs can be linked back into the xtender validate database and will also be automatically linked to the requirements used to define the flight-test card. This simplifies the flight-test process and allows managers to see that the system requirements have been completely exercised by flight testing.
MicroPilot integrates a number of different GPS receivers into its autopilots, including Trimble, u-blox and Novatel.
Sky Sapience in Israel has developed a unique HoverMast-100 solution for short-range, over-the-horizon reconnaissance. This UAV on a tether requires a high level of stabilization, which the MicroPilot autopilot enables. The tether allows for deployment up to a height of 50 meters within seconds, and the UAV can carry a 13-pound payload for a video camera, IR sensor, laser rangefinder, RF relay or other sensor — real-time data is transmitted to users over a wideband radio link. Armed forces in the United States, Israel and Asia are using the HoverMast-100. Commercial applications include power-line inspection, oil and gas pipelines, security, perimeter security, oil rigs, boats, agriculture, communication, sports events and disaster relief.
MicroPilot’s customer base is worldwide, with almost 1,000 different organizations having dealt with the company over the years. The range of applications goes from researchers flying a very odd vehicle with the ailerons split into a dozen segments (each controlled separately) all the way to customers using the system for traditional intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), such as Bluebird Aero Systems. There are also customers that make multi-rotors (the proS3 in Italy) for a variety of data-collection needs; customers that fly targets (Avartek of Finland); customers that fly helicopters for video filming and emergency responders (Bertin in France and Helicam Pro in Italy); and customers that use UAVs in aerostats (Top I Vision in Israel). There are also a bunch of universities doing research using UAVs, and a couple of customers flying turbine powered UAVs.
So, for a significant number of UAV manufacturers and operators spread around the world, MicroPilot has become the supplier they rely on for autopilot solutions. And with the FAA now issuing what seems to be daily exemptions that allow commercial use of UAVs, it’s good to know that at least one autopilot supplier is already working towards the reliability and availability that certified applications of these vehicles will ultimately require.
In the time since my first article on indoor location, I’ve learned that there is a whole lot to this indoor location technology and business. A number of companies are taking on the indoor challenge, but few have so far successfully cracked this nut.
Rx Networks in Vancouver, Canada, is one of those few who have not only found solutions that work and work reliably, but it has also found a way to commercialize their solutions and make money.
Its embedded software and services are used daily in more than 1 billion devices — mostly smartphones, some machine-to-machine (M2M) installations, tablets, laptops, and wearables. That is some claim!
Daily transactions are primarily requests for A-GNSS assistance data, but also include requests for location based on Wi-Fi and Cell-IDs. Devices are using various Rx software and/or services, which include any or all data from a four-constellation reference network (GPStream GRN), extended ephemeris (GPStream PGPS), and Wi-Fi/Cell-ID positioning (XYBRID RT).
Founded in 2006, and still privately held, Rx is currently profitable. The head office is in Vancouver, and the company has a remote office in Atlanta, Georgia. Rx Network provides GNSS assistance-data to nearly all North American mobile operators and to several international carriers, helping those customers comply with current E-911 requirements and also offer other location-based services (LBS). In anticipation of a potential FCC “indoor” E-911 mandate, Rx’s offerings have been expanded to provide the location of devices where GNSS is not available. Its patented IP is also licensed through major GNSS semiconductor vendors and, in several cases, directly to the smartphone manufacturers.
Rx’s global reference network (GPStream GRN) is the foundation of many Rx solutions, including real-time assistance data and predictions. The service supports GPS and GLONASS, and will soon incorporate BeiDou and Galileo — the data is used by mobile operators and service providers and as an input to other products like XYBRID Cloud, where assistance data is supplied to a cloud-based positioning engine. And GPStream PGPS supplies data from the reference network to create seed files that generate extended ephemeris on smartphones.
The Rx worldwide network of GNSS reference stations. Photo: Rx Networks
There may be growing concerns about the status of the nascent Galileo constellation, but back in May, there was good signal coverage at times in Vancouver, Naples, and Prague. This enabled Rx to conduct testing on behalf of the European GNSS Agency (GSA) in challenging signal environments. The tests confirmed that Galileo significantly improved the accuracy of location-based services in urban canyons and indoors. Galileo signals were incorporated in the positioning solution with various combinations of GPS and GLONASS.
A new product known as XYBRID Cloud — a “cloud-based software receiver” — is going to trial shortly with a major U.S. carrier interested in using Rx’s indoor GNSS capability to locate small cells, home phone units, and other assets that carriers have to manage. The latest release of Cloud is providing an acquisition sensitivity of –166 dBm, which is claimed to be the best in the industry.
The XYBRID Cloud system. Photo: Rx Networks
XYBRID Cloud captures I & Q data transmitted by satellites and sends it to a cloud-based positioning engine to determine location. This is in contrast to sending it to a receiver engine on a chip within the device. This is automatic, but is not really done for a “user” as much as for an asset such as a Wi-Fi access point, small cell, or other device that someone wants to locate.
Because these devices are often deep indoors, they may only see a few milliseconds of GNSS signals every now and then, so a real-time GNSS chip receiver would never get a fix. However, XYBRID Cloud assembles the captured data over time and is eventually able to record the location of the asset. This may take a few minutes or a few days, but a fix comes together eventually. Given that these assets are normally in fixed locations and seldom if ever move, such delays are not an issue, but knowing their location or if they’ve been moved can be quite valuable.
XYBRID RT/Synchro. Photo: Rx Networks
Another Rx product, XYBRID RT/Synchro,provides Wi-Fi and Cell-ID indoor and outdoor positioning using observed Wi-Fi and -tower signals, both with and without an active network connection. The systems works in real time (RT), and Synchro uses local datasets (regions) for Wi-Fi and other radio beacons that are downloaded into the user device whenever their signal is detected. Each “region” can be tailored to best suit a user’s general location, such as a metro area, city or other venue. The system is capable of a fast GNSS fix with improved sensitivity, or can fall back to basic Cell-ID/Wi-Fi positioning. Location is available indoors with an accuracy of 5-10 meters, depending on the quality of the regional datasets.
Zed provides floor-level detection based on barometric pressure data. Photo: Rx Networks
Zed is able to provide floor-level detection based on barometric pressure data to within a vertical accuracy of 1-3 meters. Zed combines a global pressure reference with crowd-sourced data for fine-grained performance. This improves Wi-Fi location accuracy and supports Wi-Fi crowd sourcing with altitude geo-tagging.
So, Rx indoor solutions can use various combinations of these three products depending on the capabilities of the user devices. XYBRID RT provides location indoors using Cell-IDs, but more often uses Wi-Fi for more accurate positioning. XYBRID Cloud provides location of assets by sending any observed satellite signals to Rx servers for processing. Zed provides a calibration and ground-level reference pressure for a device, typically a smartphone equipped with a barometric sensor. Applications include location determination for smartphones, tablets, and wearables, and XYBRID Cloud finds assets like access points, small cells, Bluetooth beacon gateways, and home phone systems. Three companies are currently using Rx technology in the wearables space — a sports watch, augmented reality glasses, and heads-up display cycling glasses.
Other services supplied by Rx include worldwide Assisted GNSS (A-GNSS):
GPStream GRN – Relies on data collected from the Rx worldwide grid of reference receivers for GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou and Galileo. Data is compatible with all popular positioning servers from leading vendors such as Ericsson, NEC, NSN, Qualcomm, and TCS.
GPStream PGPS – Predicted GPS is an efficient handset-based extended ephemeris A-GNSS solution which supports GPS and GLONASS, for both connected and autonomous operation. Galileo is slated to be demonstrated at the Naviteq conference in December and to be available in 2015 along with BeiDou.Each device equipped with the PGPS client accesses Rx servers at least once every 14 days and downloads a small seed file that is used to create extended ephemeris for each constellation for the following 14 days.
The GPStream PGPS software. Photo: Rx Networks
Rx claims that its A-GNSS services have “carrier-level reliability” — that is to say, 99.999% availability per year.
Rx semi-conductor customers use an IP package that is embedded in processor chips for cell phones. They typically go on to supply Rx software (GPStream PGPS) with their GNSS chips, which is then run on a phone’s host processor — designed in at the factory as part of the phone.
OEM customers buy Rx GPStream PGPS software either directly or from the GNSS chip manufacturer and design it into the smartphone at the factory.
Mobile operators and service providers buy A-GNSS data that is delivered to mobile phones using location-based services for 911 caller location and LBS. Rx also supplies these customers with data containing the locations of Cell-IDs and Wi-Fi access points.
It’s good to hear that someone is already making a living with indoor location. And with so many signals of opportunity, inertial and pressure sensors now being used to “help” or actually completely replace GNSS, the era of indoor testing seems to be giving way to everyday consumer use. The average consumer will likely not realize when they seamlessly transition from outdoors GNSS guidance to “indoor” signals driving their smartphone map inside the mall. Or how really difficult it is for GNSS guidance to work in downtown when they automatically get A-GNSS assistance data that keeps their car map guidance on the correct street. Good for consumers, good for the telecoms guys, and good for the GNSS industry.
After the death of Mao Zedong, who had himself changed the “cultural” face of China, Deng Xiaoping led China from 1978 until his death in February 1997. During that period, China advanced economically further than it did in the previous 200 years, and rose from a financial backwater into one of the world’s largest economies. From 1978 to 1998, GNP increased 500%, average annual income rose from a few hundred dollars to $1,800, savings increased 14,000%, and exports went from $10 billion a year to $153 billion. In a Chinese 1998 survey, Deng was named the number-one hero in China.
Deng Xiaoping.
To achieve all this, there had to be a strategy — a vision of how to bring about such significant change. The approach chosen was to lead and support through government-sponsored initiatives — and the group who was in the best position to be able to convince people and demonstrate by example was China’s well-educated military.
So now we get to GNSS, and of course one of these initiatives was to emulate what the U.S. had done and to create its own satnav system. So we have the BeiDou/Compass space and ground control infrastructure. And having built all this, indeed they did come and a Chinese GNSS industry began to emerge. But it nearly didn’t happen.
In 1994 as part of Deng Xiaoping’s efforts, a state company was formed to pursue economic reform. Ruxin Zhou was one of those military guys who was there, and he recognized that the planned military BeiDou satnav system could be an avenue towards a huge commercial opportunity for China. But the Chinese military was already launched on a course to build BeiDou for their own purposes, and maybe they didn’t want to get caught up in these economic changes going on with the civilian population. As a member of the government advisory group, Colonel Zhou worked long and hard to promote his concept with several levels of government and to persuade military leaders and those involved with BeiDou that they should participate in Xiaoping’s reforms. Ultimately he was successful, and BeiDou eventually emerged as a joint military civilian system.
The next step was to somehow create a commercial business out of all this. To do that, in 2000 Mr. Zhou formed Beijing BDStar Navigation Company Ltd. with only himself and another original founder — Mr. Jianhui Li. Based in Beijing, BDStar was ideally located close to the government, close to military management, and close to the BeiDou operations and control centers. Coincidentally, around the same time, NovAtel in Calgary was beginning to be active in the region and was looking for dealers to market its OEM receivers into China. After a trial phase with a couple of dealers, it was finally agreed that BDStar would represent NovAtel exclusively in China.
That’s when I first met Ruxin Zhou — with U.S. WAAS development well underway, it turned out that China was also interested in creating its own Satellite Navigation Augmentation System (SNAS), and was considering NovAtel’s WAAS GI reference receivers for the ground infrastructure. Mr. Zhou became the contact point between NovAtel and BDStar, and what followed was what appeared to us to be a lengthy, frustrating negotiation which rolled out in both China and in Canada. Now we know that not only was the SNAS program making sure it understood the technology inside the NovAtel WAAS receiver, but Mr. Zhou was also learning English, the ways of doing Western commercial business, and, most of all, he was getting to know and be comfortable with us.
NovAtel went on to win three contracts to supply 85 WAAS receivers to the SNAS system over three years, and the relationship with BDStar and Mr. Zhou became one which both sides wished to grow and prosper. NovAtel OEM receivers were also supplied in quantity into a number of applications that BDStar developed in China over many years. BeiDou was also an important catalyst to initially help BDStar gain traction — the company equipped 40,000 fishing boats with BeiDou messaging receivers over several years, used for basic communication across the fleet and for location reporting to monitor authorized fishing areas.
Fast forward to today. Almost 15 years have gone by. Mr. Zhou is now chairman of the board of the BDStar Navigation group of companies, and Mr. Li is president, running day-to-day ongoing business at BDStar. I sat down with my old friend in Tampa at the Institute of Navigation (ION) GNSS + Conference to catch up with the growth and expansion of this business and listen to the many achievements that have now turned BDStar into the largest (¥780 million RMB = $127 million US) GNSS-based public company in China. BDStar had a difficult beginning between 2000 and 2007, like many start-ups, but has now emerged as a profitable leading enterprise within the Chinese BeiDou industry.
Ruxin Zhou, Chairman of the Board, BDStar Navigation.
Ruxin Zhou was born in March 1963, and he has been involved in China’s GNSS industry since 1994. He lives in Beijing, and is the father of two sons. He is also vice chairman of the Association of GNSS of China. He earned his BSc degree in 1983 followed by his master’s in 1989, both at University of NanKai in Tianjin. His MBA was awarded by the University of Beijing in 2003.
Ruxin Zhou considers BeiDou an important part of the GNSS industry, and he is looking forward to cooperating with other GNSS related companies inside and outside China to add more value to users.
Mr. Zhou chairs the BDStar board of directors — one of whom is the president of the company. There is also a group chief technology officer (CTO), a board secretary who is responsible for investment, three outside directors from industry, and an advisor who is familiar with government financial policy. Along with the parent company BDStar Navigation Products Division and its internal GNSS Applications Division, there are nine subsidiary companies, each of which is governed by a small management board.
BDStar Information Service Co. — Largest BeiDou operations service provider.
Unicore Communications, Inc. — Consumer and precision chipset and board-level receivers.
BDStar Hong-Kong — Import/export company for the group.
Shenzhen XG Electronics Co. — Vehicle electronics and installations.
BeijingSinsTek Technology — MEMS inertial technologies for defense.
Beijing Hanvic Photoelectricity Co. — Navigation using IR/photo–electric technologies.
BeiDou Information Equipment Co. — National Defense equipment and services.
Recently, the BeiDou Equipment Division within BDStar has become a separate company known as BeiDou Information Equipment Co., and another company — Harxon, which manufactures antennas — is in the process of being added to the group.
The number of people working within the BDStar group has grown from an initial staff of 20 when Mr. Zhou and Mr. Li began operating the company, to around 1,500 people today in 2014.
BDStar Navigation is where this all began as a value-added reseller for NovAtel OEM receivers — integrating them into a number of applications, such as vehicle, marine and military navigation installations. BDStar was also instrumental in the establishment of the ground infrastructure for SNAS and took part in the construction of the system. As this business increased, installations became focused within a separate group, along with building the equipment using integrated NovAtel GPS and inertial OEM equipment — the GNSS Applications Division.
With an increasing number of satellite launches, and a growing ground infrastructure, BeiDou began to become a more important part of China’s GNSS/navigation infrastructure. BDStar began to play a larger role in the emerging BeiDou program (BeiDou System or BDS), and it became clear that BeiDou technology would have to be developed by BDStar in China. And so the spin-off and company start-up phase of BDStar’s growth got underway.
BDStar Information Service Co., Ltd.
BDStar Information Services Limited is a wholly owned subsidiary of BDStar Navigation, providing location-based system solutions and information services, based on the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System, for the fishery, agriculture, forestry, water conservancy, and meteorology industries. By integrating Internet and mobile communication networks with geographic information, BDStar Information Service has now become the largest BDS information service provider in China with more than 40,000 BeiDou end-users, hundreds of government users and more than 100,000 mobile phone users. The service is 24/7/365 and includes real-time positioning, and short message communication for typhoon warnings, emergency alarms and other related services. The system has capacity for over 100 million navigation positioning and communications messages per year.
Ship terminal. Photo: BeiDouBeidou Operational Service Center. Photo: BeiDou
Unicore Communications Inc. (Beijing)
Unicore Communications Inc. is a share-holding subsidiary of BDStar Navigation — a high-tech company dedicated to highly integrated system-on-a-chip (SoC) IC design and GNSS algorithm development. Unicore is focused on the commercialization of BeiDou through advanced GNSS professional applications and innovative technology breakthroughs — one of the leading Chinese companies involved in the “industrialization” of BeiDou systems.
Unicore provides turn-key location-based services (LBS) in both the GNSS professional and consumer navigation segments. An innovative core chip has been independently developed, providing high-performance GNSS as well as low-cost, low-power, high-quality products with positioning accuracy ranging from millimeter all the way up to meter levels. Not only have high-precision requirements for surveying, mapping and CORS reference stations been satisfied, these components have also been used in less onerous applications such as vehicle monitoring and personal navigation.
By the second quarter of 2014, Unicore has sold more than one million BeiDou SoC chips and won multiple breakthroughs in BeiDou multi-GNSS applications such as in-dash automotive navigation, automatic driving test system, Ground-Based Augmentation System (GBAS), and the International GNSS Monitoring and Assessment Service for Open Service (iGMAS).
Beijing Hanvic Photoelectricity is a share-holding subsidiary of BDStar Navigation targeted at the infrared thermal imager market. The company has used in-house infrared optics, imaging circuitry, image processing, artificial intelligence, mechanical structures and system engineering to develop a number of products using planar and linear arrays. Short-medium-long-wave infrared cooling thermal imagers can provide users with a visual context under varying weather conditions from up to tens of kilometers from a target object. These products are widely used in scientific research, electrical distribution, forest-fire prevention, surveillance, public security, firefighting, and anti-smuggling.
Beijing SinsTek Technology Co., Ltd.
Beijing SinsTek Technology is a shareholding subsidiary of BDStar Navigation specializing in the original development of inertial navigation, inertial measurement, and measurement and control systems and devices- for which SinsTek owns all related intellectual property rights. SinsTek has independently developed products such as high-precision quartz accelerometers and gyros, mixed inertial navigation systems, missile-borne computers, a missile overload switch and a ground control system. Products and systems have been widely used within China in various fields of national defense and also commercially.
Shenzhen XuGang Electronics Co., Ltd.
Shenzhen XuGang Electronics was founded as a shareholding subsidiary of BDStar Navigation in 2001. The company undertakes product development, design, manufacture and sales of medium- to high-end consumer-level vehicle audio-video navigation products and services. The company has more than two decades of experience in automobile accessories, and has good cooperative relationships with China’s major automobile manufacturers. With a marketing network that extends across China, the company is one of the most important automotive electronics and navigation products providers in China. Automotive products are also exported to the U.S., Russia, Brazil, Israel and to other countries.
The scope of this business includes:
CAR navigation/CAR audio original design manufacturer (ODM) — High volume/high-quality production of auto accessories, auto electronics and GNSS products.
Marine radio ODM — Waterproof hi-fi player/radios have won wide recognition in Europe and the U.S. This is the only Chinese company whose SIRIUS satellite radio technology has been certified in the U.S.
Telematics auto network solutions — BDStar auto navigation system and BDStar Black Box have been independently developed, fusing sensors, network communications, processing and controlling technologies to provide telematics products and services for auto makers and commercial consumers.
BeiDou online telematics. Photo: BeiDou
Navigation Products Division
The Navigation Products Division has successfully collaborated for more than 10 years with NovAtel as its value-added reseller (VAR) of GNSS and GNSS-inertial products in China. Focused on satellite positioning and inertial navigation applications, BDStar has promoted domestic Chinese navigation and positioning applications development, and has established close cooperative relationships with domestic inertial and integrated mapping companies, research institutes, and other sectors. Application fields include railways, electricity, telecommunications, meteorology, and seismology. Quite naturally, independently developed BeiDou products have also followed this route to market in China.
NovAtel OEM6 receiver. Photo: BeiDou
GNSS Application Division
The GNSS Application Division is the business division of BDStar Navigation, which is mainly engaged in the development, production, sales, and service of the products based on high-precision GNSS technology applications. With the objective of becoming expert in high-precision GNSS solutions used in the developing industry using the “Internet Of Things (IOT),” the company provides a series of GNSS terminal products and solutions for the civilian market. Applications have included agriculture, container ports, and deformation monitoring. Meanwhile, the successful port IOT that this division has provided for Tianjin Port has now been implemented at more than 20 domestic and foreign ports including Shanghai, Ningbo, Shenzhen, and in India.
BeiDou Internet of ships Photo: BeiDou
BeiDou Information Equipment Co.
BeiDou Information Equipment, a wholly owned subsidiary of BDStar Navigation, is focused on supplying products for national defense and government agencies, and provides complete solutions and products for dispatch management of hazardous materials and special cargo handling. Several successful projects have been undertaken, including special hazardous vehicle command and monitoring, public security, anti-terrorism, forest-fire prevention, emergency management, personnel command and monitoring of disaster relief, public security, and border defense. The division relies on its experience in system engineering, command and control software, radio system design, and military satellite navigation to provide users with terminal products such as navigation, timing and heading, and location-based military information service systems. Specific products developed include terminal equipment, vehicle-mounted navigators, vehicle traveling data recorders, police positioning and telecommunication terminals, and an emergency communication system.
Following this phase of significant growth, what does the future hold for BDStar? We know that China’s huge annual rate of GDP growth may have slowed a little, but Mr. Zhou still has pretty big aspirations for his group of companies. His target for 2020 is to have BDStar reach annual sales of 10 billion RMB ($1.63B US). To get there, his intermediate step is to reach 2 billion RMB ($326m US) by the end of next year. Overall, this represents a ten-fold growth in revenue over six years — by Chinese industrial standards, this might even be termed “modest” growth.
But where will all this growth come from? The strategy appears to be textbook:
Through significant organic (internal) growth, or by doing the same things better and to a greater extent.
Through strategic partnerships with targeted leading companies in key growth areas.
Through further acquisition of companies that would improve the bottom line and also benefit from the synergies of the existing corporate group.
While the anticipated course would be to add companies at the corporate level, it’s possible that some companies within the organization may also get to the point where they see adding an organization below or alongside may become a profitable avenue for their own growth. Of course, other suitable companies in China would be on Mr. Zhou’s strategic acquisition list, but he’s also looking for expansion elsewhere around the world. The U.S. market is significant for the type of products and technologies available in the BDStar group, so it would be natural to anticipate that a North American acquisition could help improve product distribution and development. As BeiDou becomes an integral part of global GNSS, and industry partners seek more than Open Service capability and better Chinese access, its also conceivable that partnerships with North American players could come about.
So, at least with BDStar and some other similar Chinese companies, it would seem that those earlier 1990s aspirations of the Chinese government to create a commercial economic sector within the Chinese economy have at least begun to show a measure of success in the GNSS market segment.
ION GNSS+ is more than satellite navigation, with lots of options for aiding, augmenting and even replacing GNSS, both indoors or outdoors. There were a few less exhibitors this year, but just as many attendees as last year, and lots of good quality technical, commercial and interesting topics in the paper and panel sessions. And, in the customary discussions around the show, there was as much catch-up andspeculation over recent events as usual — all in the beautiful surroundings of Tampa, Florida.
Tampa is a pretty nice place, especially at this time of year as the summer heat is dying and the humidity is down. Then there are lots of things to see and do in Tampa and all those Florida attractions over in Orlando, if you bring the family with you and can find a few extra days to use as vacation.
The ION exhibit was slightly smaller (57 booths versus 63 last year) — Javad, for one, didn’t exhibit with his regular large booth, and the USAF testing guys didn’t show either — but the number of attendees (1,000+) was pegged at around the same as last year.
So, although the commercial exhibit might have been down a little, the popularity of ION GNSS+ is still there, and the location helped too, bringing a bunch of people to take a look at South Florida. ION made considerable effort this time around to appeal to the wider business aspects of the industry, and it had a number of successes doing this. So, let’s assume that as we emerge from a somewhat flat business phase that industry growth will resume shortly, and ION attendance will reflect that growth in future years.
Some companies introducing new products included IFEN with its new SX3 software receiver, Altus with the APS-NR2 integrated antenna/wireless/GNSS RTK receiver, Unicore with the UM220-INS GPS/Beidou receiver with integrated six-axis MEMS and the UB280 dual-antenna GPS/Beidou receiver, and Comnav,which also introduced a dual-antenna heading receiver. For most other OEM companies at the show, it was more status quo, and they were at ION checking out their competition, visiting with existing customers, showing hardware for potential customers to “kick the tires” and meeting with others to pursue new longer term business opportunities and potential collaboration efforts.
The scuttlebutt around the recent Galileo launch anomaly was headed up by ESA’s assurances that everything possible was being done to rescue its rogue FOC (full operational capability) satellites, circularize their orbits, and use them in the constellation. Then there were several variations on potential sabotage conspiracy theories, and others proposing that a solution to the problem could be to just quickly build and launch more satellites — maybe not on Soyuz. Spending new money on replacement satellites and new Ariane launches rather than on a protracted science project to rescue these lost SVs — this seemed to be favored by most North American pundits.
Septentrio, along with introducing a new RTK engine, made an organizational change, integrating Septentrio and Altus, and combining product marketing efforts for both companies’ products. Septentrio’s Jan Van Hees will now not only be the market lead for Septentrio’s products, but also Altus’ products, and both marketing organizations will now work closely together. Executive Director Peter Grognard was also in Tampa, leading his usual high-energy charge for Septentrio and the European GNSS industry. Altus has also added industry veteran Mo Kapila as OEM sales manager for Septentrio products. Kapila is based in Altus’ office in Torrance, California.
More organizational changes may follow at NovAtel, as Executive Vice President Graham Purves moves out to take the reins at Hexagon’s recently acquired Veripos subsidiary. Graham was born in Scotland, so he’s returning to his roots as he moves to the Veripos Aberdeen office from NovAtel’s base in Calgary, Canada. Graham and Hexagon may be watching for the results of the Scottish independence referendum, which should be known shortly after the vote Friday, September 18. However, negotiations with the UK government — required by a “yes” vote — may drag on for some time after. If this all comes about, maybe it will allow sufficient time to assess the potential impact on Veripos’ operations.
Indoor Location
ION held a panel and demonstration session on indoor location, reflecting the huge interest in indoor E-911 and commercial indoor applications. One of the leading outfits working the indoor problem using beacons is NextNav in California, who chose not to demonstrate its capabilities. However, I did learn that NextNav is active in around 47 urban markets, is setting up another large trial in Seattle, and has recently acquired another $70m investment in the last few months. Rx Networks was also there to show its latest assistance and location products including Zed, a service that calibrates pressure sensors to determine floor level, and XYBRID Cloud, a cloud-based GNSS engine that achieved GNSS fixes down to 2 meters inside the exhibition hall where there was otherwise no GNSS coverage.
The Indoor Location Panel discussion was around establishing standards for development of indoor location capabilities — there were eight panel members and apparently four prevailing standards areas/groups involved in developing standards for different aspects of what essentially is a wide field of differing communications systems. For someone involved in making and using one common standard for a particular GNSS and aviation industry application, this session was basically baffling.
The interesting indoor location story at the show came in the following afternoon session, where seven companies set up live (or close to live) demonstrations in a large area on the first floor of the Tampa Convention Center, where there was little prospect for any GNSS sky signals to penetrate. There were a number of Wi-Fi access points (AP) set up in the room, along with a Nokia beacon.
Basically using the Wi-Fi APs, and their vertical measurement Zed, the Rx team was trying to show static positioning of their location in the demo room. They certainly had a hiccup during the demo and may have lost a bunch of accumulated data, but they didn’t comment on what appeared to be large errors they showed on a Google Earth representation of the convention center.
This team was using a Round Trip Timing (RTT) method, ranging off the three Wi-Fi APs, and measuring location and collecting data on a smartphone. To demonstrate its ranging accuracy, Broadcom measured range to an AP using a laser rangefinder and demonstrated high correlation with the range measured by RTT.
Using Wi-Fi ranging and integrated MEMS inertial for Pedestrian Dead Reckoning (PDR), CSR plotted a path walked round the room, with what appeared to be pretty good accuracy. CSR also indicated how magnetic/compass measurements can be thrown off by ferrous structures in buildings.
Following an initial crash and a quick restart, PNI ran an excellent demo of plotted position on a tablet using a 15-state Kalman Filter using extremely low-power gyro, accelerometers and mag-sensor (PDR), which also indicated mag-sensor errors.
Indoo.rs indicated that its solutions are fielded commercially and use Wi-Fi fingerprinting and iBeacon/Bluetooth tracking sensor fusion, with added floor-plan constraints when available. Unfortunately, efforts to follow a smartphone around the room with a video camera did not capture the demonstration for the audience.
Navizon claimed 1-2 meter indoor accuracy using Wi-Fi finger-printing, BLE iBeacons, and inertial, using a portable software solution it provide to integrators. The systems works best when the system is “trained” using a floor plan and PDR. A YouTube video recorded earlier was used to demonstrate the system’s capabilities.
Nokia presented its angle-of-arrival technology with HAIP RF tags and a remote positioning server, which was demonstrated with tags on radio-controlled cars, with a tablet display that indicated that tracking appeared to be highly accurate.
So, to summarize, the participants were very brave to attempt these real-time demos and most pulled off the challenge, with varying degrees of success and demonstrated accuracy. This would seem to indicate that the anticipated FCC ruling for new indoor E-911 location requirements could well be met by existing technologies.
Interference and Anti-Jamming Systems
One of the big things at the show was the Signal Sentry 1000, an Exelis product that detects and locates GPS interference sources in 3-D. Given that Exelis is also connected to jammers and the U.S. Department of Defense, it’s not unusual that the company has found a way to bring a system to the commercial market that finds jammers.
A lesser known, much smaller offshore outfit is also working with jammer/interference detection. GPSat Systems Australia related its involvement in the GGPS RF Jamming and Spoofing Detection and Geo-location Technology projects, in cooperation with the Universities of New South Wales (UNSW) and Adelaide (UA).
After four years of development jointly funded by the Australian Research Council and GPSat Systems, the output from combined research into jammer detection and geolocation by UNSW and UA is starting to bear fruit. Two papers were presented showcasing their weak interference detection and localization techniques, followed by a project update and preliminary field trial results.
The technology focuses on combining the performance of multi-element, high-gain, steerable-beam antenna arrays producing angle of arrival (AoA) data, along with centralized time difference of arrival (TDOA) spectral processing of jammer signals arriving at different sensor nodes. Combining the two techniques provides the best options for successfully geolocating both swept CW and broadband jammers at substantial stand-off distances.
GPSat Systems is now under contract to further extend this technology to include spoofer detection for future deployment with the Australian defence services. GPSat Systems anticipates that the civilian L1 version will be introduced to the market by early 2015, and the military version by middle 2016.
The GNSS world needs more help to halt the “jamming plague,” and GPSat seems to have a solution that a number of organizations may want to look into.
So, another ION GNSS+ conference is in the books, with lots of GNSS news and interesting developments on a number of fronts. Not a whole bunch of new OEM-receiver-related products, but a whole mess of indoor location systems pushing the technology envelope and the promise of more to come. I hope Galileo gets it right chasing their lost birds, that new company organizations flourish in the coming months, and that we have more jamming detection and anti-jam solutions to talk about at next year’s conference — which will once again be down among the palm trees in Tampa.
I was born in the UK, so I still have a soft spot for people and things going on there. I really enjoy those PBS Mystery dramas, and, of course, Downton Abbey. Where’s this going? you might ask. It’s basically to preface an overview of a GNSS outfit I know quite well, which operates out of Lancaster in northwest England.
Forsberg Services Ltd. (FSL) has been around as a consulting company since 1987, when Charles Forsberg began the company, developing marine engineering solutions and, beginning in 1999, also representing NovAtel OEM GPS in the UK and the Middle East.
In 2002 the company was reconfigured as a navigation systems engineering company. With a number of successful programs underway in both the UK and Germany, FSL went on to open an office in Würzburg Germany, in 2002. At the same time, FSL won its first major naval contract with the CPUpak — an interconnect enclosure containing both SAASM and commercial CA-code receivers, which distributes GPS data to multiple systems. The CPUpak is now on several countries’ mine-countermeasure vessels (MCMV). It was also developed as an inertial navigation system as a key part of naval vessels’ air operations certification systems.
CPUpak is on a number of MCMVs.
FSL is still privately owned, has 26 employees, and considers itself a “design house” for vehicle manufacturers, the marine industry, defense contractors, cellular operators, and television networks. It is an ISO9001-certified R&D partner to several blue-chip companies for navigation systems.
Today, its primary activities include:
selling and supporting off-the-shelf FSL and NovAtel GNSS products and providing associated customer service,
custom engineering solutions developed over very tight timescales,
research into new and emerging markets and development to create new opportunities,
managing production of FSL products and also for key customers.
As NovAtel’s dealer in UK and Germany, FSL markets and services the full range of NovAtel OEM products, including the latest OEM6 GNSS receivers, Waypoint inertial and post-processing software, Antcom antennas, and Raven Starlink RF components.
NovAtel GAJT anti-jam system, OEM6, and Pinwheel antenna.FS-D6 processor module.
FSL has developed a number of key building blocks to enable further integration and production of various GNSS enclosures based on common hardware and software designs. This has allowed FSL to develop multiple systems in parallel and to expand the level of support provided through its dedicated team of engineers. The FSL-developed FS-D6 processor module and EDGE-WARE firmware it runs, along with the earlier FS-M4 microcontroller and FS-D5 DSP module, have become key building blocks that have enabled the creation of other products.
ReACT integrated GNSS/antenna.
The ReACT smart antenna was first produced in 2011, and has been qualified to appropriate mil-spec standards for use on military vehicles, with RS232/422, USB, and CAN interfaces providing data outputs. The unit has a sturdy, waterproof enclosure for operating in harsh environments, with up to 5 serial, 3 USB and 2 CAN interface channels to hook up other sensors. Applications have included INS and dual-antenna heading reference for military vehicles; agriculture; reference navigation for optical navigation; and photogrammetry.
MICROpod.
The MICROpod unit houses up to two GNSS receivers, and comes with a heading/attitude determination option. A MICROpod telecoms application involved supplying GNSS data to each radio network controller (RNC) to provide AGPS (assisted-GPS) data over the cellular network — the objective was to improve the start-up time for supporting emergency services. A less-expensive solution than installing separate GNSS receivers with each RNC, but certification to CE/FCC and IP67 was essential. The solution was the MICROpod eight serial ports along with firmware that made each RNC think it was connected to an independent receiver. Within the processor, the inbound commands and outbound data were managed to ensure that the system was serviced as expected. The whole project had extremely tight timescales — from contract award in August 2008, to first delivery on-site in the U.S. in November. The system was designed, developed, certified and passed test, all within three months! Around 400 systems are now installed across sites in the U.S. and around the world.
The unit has a sturdy IP65 enclosure, with up to 10 serial, 3 USB and 2 CAN interface channels to hook up other sensors. Other applications for MICROpod have included sub-10 nanosecond time synchronization of LIDAR, Earth observation/IR cameras, third-party INS, networked military vehicle/vessel navigation and data communications, pulse-train generation for coded equipment operations, and precision velocity measurement. Another variant has been customized and qualified for Train Control Network (TCN) applications.
FSL has also dabbled in a couple of “glamorous” undertakings along the way, such as providing inertial/GPS dynamics measurement for the Red Bull World Series air races in Abu Dhabi, and also race-car inertial/GPS tracking and camera slaving for TV. A byproduct of the race-car project was a patent for a computer game using race data for vehicles that took part or could actually be played live during a Grand Prix on a particular circuit from a participating car.
Abu Dhabi air race aircraft.Air race graphics.GTR evolution game patent.
An interesting oblique photography application involved aircraft fitted with DSLR and video camera as well as other EO/IR sensors, their position and orientation measured by inertial navigation all feeding into FSL’s OPTOnav. A recent enhancement has been release of an in-flight bore-sight calibration. This is essential when navigation and camera choice may only be applicable for a single flight, and rapidly rendered results are necessary. The system works with a choice of cameras. For one project, an advanced GSS C516 compact five-axis gyro-stabilized platform and INS have been configured with Canon 1DC, Corona and Red Dragon cameras. The resultant ground positions are comfortably accurate to better than 1 meter at 500-meter range in real-time. This is despite GPS antenna often being fitted in less than ideal locations such as inside the cockpit of some aircraft.
The FSL OPTOnav product originated in 2006 as a piece of software installed on a rubber-tired gantry crane in a container port. The customer was experiencing problems of crane drivers being unable to see that they were drifting off course and moving outside of track, creating a safety risk. The crane is shaped like a staple, where the driver sits on one leg with the container in between the legs. As a result, the other leg cannot be seen clearly. This system is currently being enhanced so that it may utilize the latest technologies.
The software takes feeds from a GNSS receiver and from cameras. Using these inputs, a pattern and line-matching algorithm was developed to provide drivers with a centimeter-level indication of whether they were to the right or left of a safety line, along with the heading of the crane’s cameras to better than a 20th of a degree. This data was used to augment the GNSS in challenging areas, and unlike INS, simply doesn’t drift. During the development, a number of obstacles including shadows, reflections and obstructions were overcome.
This work leads to an RT version, which augments RTK GPS in obstructed sky locations, and a PP version, which supports precise point positioning aided GPS for applications such as photogrammetry. The system may be used to measure precise ranges to targets, and position is determined by triangulation. Simple, accurate and effective!
Measure the same point in multiple shots at different angles and distances: OPTOnav provides a 3D position.
So, let’s recap. That’s project management of contracted hardware, software and production to very short timescales; sales and support of GNSS; inertial and optical navigation; and OEM products from NovAtel, Waypoint and Antcom. That’s lots of options — along with access to markets in UK, Germany and elsewhere, and specialist applications in photogrammetry, machine control, survey, telecommunications and systems integration. So, although Forsberg Services Ltd. may be one of many outfits around the world in the value-added reseller (VAR) game, it certainly has enough irons in the fire. And it has demonstrated the quick turn-around of a small, flexible organization with a track record of success — so Forsberg Services should anticipate a bright, growing and interesting future.
TECTERRA is an Alberta government initiative to encourage and support start-ups in the geomatics field in Canada. In June, TECTERRA held its annual Geomatics Showcase at the TELUS Centre in downtown Calgary, where 56 companies and four universities had booths to exhibit their wares, tell their stories, and hopefully generate business.
Since May 2010, TECTERRA has provided $30 million in repayable loans, matched by an $18 million investment by the companies receiving assistance. As companies begin generating revenue from products or services coming out of these programs, they are required to incrementally repay the TECTERRA support funding.
The money TECTERRA has contracted to companies has come through a number of funding programs from the province of Alberta and from the government of Canada. The combined investment is estimated to have generated $58 million in economic benefit to date and is projected to generate a total of $300 million over the next few years. TECTERRA defines geomatics as, “The collection, management, integration, analysis and display of geographic information describing the Earth’s physical features and the built environment.”
A total of 46 industry-led product development and commercialization projects and 25 applied research projects have been supported, and in the process, 10 patents have been filed and another 45 are in development. Eleven companies have started to generate revenue and hence begun making repayments to TECTERRA, while two companies have already completely repaid their loans.
So the bottom line is that TECTERRA appears to be underwriting a portion of the development risk for the companies and projects it supports, and more innovative geomatics concepts are therefore making it through to the market and into useful applications. TECTERRA not only analyzes the financial business case of each project submission, but also pulls together an experienced engineering/academic review team that really digs into the technical viability of the candidate projects. At the show I came across the following Geomatics Industry Association of Canada (GIAC) estimate of the scope of geomatics in Canada:
Canada has 20% of the world market, with 40% of that coming from Alberta.
A CAGR (Compound Annual Growth) of 15-20%.
More than 2,500 companies.
35,000 people working in the industry.
Just about all the TECTERRA companies have come up with a solution that in some way incorporates, uses, or supports GNSS — this is apparently one of several criteria for a TECTERRA project. In walking and talking around the exhibit, I was more drawn to those applications where GNSS is one of the core technology ingredients.
That doesn’t mean to say that these products or companies are more or less likely to succeed or that their application could be better or worse or more or less viable. The province (Canadian for “state”) of Alberta is oil and gas country — and Calgary is a hub for a large number of outfits that supply and support the oil and gas industry. Spin-offs of large and small companies abound, and the half-life of businesses seems to grow shorter every year, but the same people seem to crop up in related ventures all the time, continuously driving technology and business innovation. Working in isolated areas, oil and gas workers are often on their own, miles away from civilization. Companies, however, ensure good communication with their people via repeaters and satellite phone connections. Nevertheless, the time when remote workers most need assistance is when they may be incapacitated and unable to call home base for help.
AbsoluteTrac originally began its operations in the firefighting industry, providing tracking and diagnostic data for pilots. In 2013 it merged with Gemini Positioning Systems to form Absolute Gemini Ltd. The combination of both organizations provided the ability to develop a new hardware product line tailored to a wide range of industries. The strong foundation from Gemini Positioning Systems for work-alone safety allowed all the development work that went into real-time remote worker alert systems over those years to be available to the private sector market, and is in use with a number of oil and gas companies.
With the ability to send automated check-in and emergency messages, the SafetyLink Pendant (SLP) can identify when a user becomes motionless or is in distress. Incorporating the use of a standalone GPS/GLONASS receiver, 3-axis accelerometer, Bluetooth and ZigBee technology, the SLP is compatible with all popular smartphone operating systems via the SafetyLink application, and the TRULink hardware series for equipment monitoring and vehicle tracking. Absolute Gemini Ltd. is a machine-to-machine (M2M) integrator, and has worked closely with a variety of vendors including Blackline GPS — another TECTERRA exhibitor in the booth right next-door.
AbsoluteTrac SafetyLink Pendant.BlacklineGPS Lōner alert device and Bridge cell/sat base repeater.
Rx Networks (Rx) is another well-established company offering, among other things, A-GNSS extended ephemeris.
Rx CEO Guylain Roy-MacHabée left, with booth staff.
Rx has been supplying indoor/outdoor solutions for E-911 and LBS using Wi-Fi/cellular/GNSS hybrid positioning for smartphones for several years. Its technology and services are used and accessed by most of the major cellphone OEMs and mobile operators. Integrated pressure sensors and “Zed” reference pressure data supply vertical accuracy of 1 to 3 meters for automatic floor-level and map selection. Rx has established a 23-site worldwide GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou and Galileo reference network using NovAtel receivers, which is compatible with popular positioning servers from leading vendors such as Ericsson, NEC, NSN, Qualcomm, and TCS.
GPStream PGPS is the company’s ASIC embedded extended ephemeris product that supports GPS/GLONASS, with both connected and autonomous operation — BeiDou and Galileo support is expected to be available shortly. LiDAR Services International(LSI) is a Calgary-based airborne LiDAR survey company that seems to exclusively use NovAtel precision GPS for its DGPS/RTK base stations and also for airborne GPS reference data collection. NovAtel SPAN inertial/GPS systems are also integrated within its in-house proprietary-developed MATRIX LiDAR systems. LSI has 20 people, with offices in Calgary and Las Vegas, and operates three airborne LiDAR systems. LSI has collected LiDAR data on five continents.
The layman’s explanation of LiDAR that I picked up at LSI was just enough to make me dangerous, if I wasn’t already pretty lethal. The LiDAR projects up to 500,000 laser pulses/second onto the area being overflown, picks up reflections, and calculates ranges for each pulse. Geocoding using both GPS and inertial then allows post-processing development of a three-dimensional point-cloud image of the surveyed area. For most surveys, LSI also collects digital imaging that can be used to overlay and further reference the point-cloud image.
One interesting application is in power-line surveys where weather data is concurrently collected with LiDAR data, so that wind speed and temperature may be used to calculate cable “sag,” not only from one survey to the next, but also for calibrating weather effects. This data has been used to allow power companies to gain insight into cable power-loading versus cable power-rating — enabling safe and secure increases in loading on existing transmission lines rather than building expensive new lines. LiDAR is also a key tool for vegetation management along transmission corridors. LSI was launching its pipeline leak detection and monitoring subsidiary GAS RECON at the show. We’ll learn more in the future about their plans for “sniffing out” gas and oil leaks from pipelines.
BlackBridge Geomatics was another Canadian company at the show — it probably deserves a mention just on the basis that it has its own constellation of five RapidEye Earth Observation (EO) satellites. No other Canadian companies seem to have that capability, and BlackBridge just announced funding for its next generation of EO satellites. RapidEye enables complete coverage of difficult-to-image areas, and imagery collected by the RapidEye constellation fills archives with large quantities of current geospatial information on a daily basis.
RapidEye satellites can collect up to 5 million km² of imagery daily, which allows BlackBridge to quickly provide large-area coverage and monitoring services for customers. BlackBridge is also the exclusive Canadian distributor for Airbus’ SPOT satellite imigary, and is a North American distributor of the DigitalGlobe WorldView 1 and 2, GeoEye-1, Quickbird, and IKONOS constellations. Lots of other companies were at the TECTERRA Showcase, with geomatics applications and other elements that contribute to a geomatics solution. Here are a few more I talked with:
Mobizou — uses mobile location to advertise via smartphones to potential customers
As I mentioned, there were a whole bunch of Canadian geomatics outfits at the show, and many more deserve a mention — please check out the Showcase Exhibitor List on the TECTERRA website and visit a few of their websites. Peter Mansbridge is a famous Canadian broadcaster whose appearance at the show may have increased attendance. His stand-up presentation was interesting and humorous, and was aimed at answering the question, “What is a Canadian?” Not many in the audience could have answered the question — it’s something we Canucks puzzle about constantly (it’s a cultural thing). However, through this show, TECTERRA has enabled us to understand a little better the contribution being made to geomatics by a significant group of Canadian start-ups and some more mature companies.
Most of you will know that during summertime I can usually be found in Calgary, Alberta — the “GPS Capital of Canada.” I usually try to pick up on developments in this area, and having recently bumped into my friends at Baseband Technologies, I found that they have made significant progress since the first time they appeared in my articles a number of years ago.
Baseband has now been around for 10 years, and has always focused on building reliable applications which are an adjunct to basic GPS, improving performance for integrated GPS in cell phones and other portable devices such as personal location watches, glasses, tracking devices, and such. Cell phones, of course, have had integrated GPS for a long time for personal navigation and 911 location.
Baseband aims to provide “instant position” with extremely low-power, low-cost positioning technologies. The company has several patents well into the approval loop, and have drawn heavily on the GNSS-rich’ availability of skilled people in and around Calgary for its significant R&D.
Baseband’s first product offering is a self-contained GNSS RF front-end that enables capture of satellite signal data for its cloud-based snapshot positioning receiver. The software receiver kit allows integrators to readily build prototypes that integrate Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, cellular modem, MEMS sensors, memory, and LCD that is compatible with the Arduino open-source electronics prototyping platform to quickly test and validate new product concepts. The snapshot receiver can also be integrated with other OEM hardware to greatly improve time-to-first-fix (TTFF) and power consumption. For customers who want to integrate snapshot positioning into silicon at the chip level, or into other hardware or software, Baseband offers system design services and a simple licensing scheme.
Nevertheless, acquiring satellites can be somewhat of a delicate operation for regular GPS receivers, and this can be especially true when a receiver is operating downtown where open sky can be intermittently blocked by buildings. The net effect is that a receiver could take a long time to calculate position, or sometimes even fail to provide a position altogether. Time is money, or in the case of cell phones, battery power is everything. So reducing power consumption and TTFF is something that a lot of OEMs are interested in achieving.
Turns out that pulling ephemeris or satellite location from satellite data can be the real issue, as the data rate of the satellite for this information is so slow. To get an initial position from four satellites could take between 16 and 36 seconds under best-case conditions — normally in a downtown core or dense forest this ideal situation is rarely achieved, and acquisition times can be much longer and become a real problem for users. Imagine how frustrating it could be for people like taxi cab or delivery trucks drivers operating downtown, where users have to constantly operate in harsh environments and may be subjected to loss of position data due to ephemeris renewal many times during a day.
Depending on the receiver that you’re using, satellite ephemeris may only be valid for up to four hours, whereas Baseband’s extended ephemeris can last for up to one month and still maintain acceptable accuracy. This means once you’ve downloaded an extended ephemeris file, there is no need to download it again for another month. Instead of relying on receiving ephemeris from satellite broadcast and suffering through its limitations under poor conditions, extended ephemeris (or satellite prediction) technology offers several advantages.
With extended ephemeris, a satellite’s ephemeris is always usable regardless of data errors and gaps in the actual transmitted satellite data. In other words, satellites that the receiver can still see, but which have low signal strength, may nevertheless be used to go directly into acquiring the lower power satellite signal, generating the Doppler and code phase, and ultimately proceed to the position calculation. So Baseband has developed and is marketing 28-Day Extended Ephemeris service to address these problems.
For a regular embedded receiver working with 28-day Ephemeris, Baseband claims to reduce TTFF from 30-60 seconds down to around 2 seconds. Even in intermittent satellite signal conditions, acquisition or reacquisition isn’t necessary, so signals can still be used for tracking. Ephemeris transmissions to the device are extremely compressed, and can be as small as 20 KB per week, while accuracy is maintained. Baseband claims its patent-pending techniques provide unparalleled orbit and clock accuracy, which allows users to obtain highly accurate predictions. Client software for the user device is platform independent and has been designed from the ground up to operate extremely efficiently with low-power processors.
So there we have it — a new approach to achieve very fast initial position for portable digital devices including cell phones and a method to overcome lengthy initial position determination under poor signal conditions, with the added bonus that power consumption is also greatly reduced.
For high-volume commercial applications where GNSS performance is important, but conditions may be far from favorable, Baseband may well have something which could really improve how OEMs take advantage of more reliable position determination with longer time between battery recharges.
AUVSI Unmanned System 2014 provided a showcase for new UAV/UAS products, and a dialogue on the rapidly growing industry.
Report from the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) Orlando, Florida, May 12-15, 2014
Just before the start of the huge AUVSI show, the FAA once again cautioned Unmanned Aerial Systems proponents that still more care is needed with UAS airspace access. The majority of UAS operators and manufacturers are making efforts to become compliant with reasonable FAA rules. Also, AUVSI had some good information on the economic benefits of UAS commercial applications to the U.S.
The annual AUVSI conference came down to the Sunshine State this year, and the sun did shine, with temperatures in the high 80s most days. The Orlando Convention Center is a huge place and AUVSI took up the majority of the South Exhibit hall along with a bunch of rooms where most of the technical presentations were run. With close to 600 exhibitors and more than 6500 attendees, this is still one of the bigger trade shows.
FAA Rules
However, just before the start of this huge show, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) once again cautioned Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) proponents that still more care is needed with UAS airspace access. It’s probably more than a coincidence that FAA released news of a March 22 close call at 2,300 feet between a US Airways airliner on approach to Tallahassee, Florida, and a model F4 Phantom Jet — UAS owner and operator unknown. And CNN also picked it up and animated it pretty quickly. As the industry as a whole strains to seek more airspace access, it’s difficult to understand how incidents like this happen. And, in the process, they push back all the good efforts that are being made by the large majority of UAS operators and manufacturers to demonstrate their ability and desire to become compliant with reasonable FAA rules.
Nevertheless, AUVSI had some good promotional material available at the conference showing the economic benefit to the U.S. for UAS commercial applications — a $82 billion market and around 104,000 jobs over the next ten year, $50 billion in the top ten states alone.
Wildfire mapping, agriculture monitoring, disaster management, power-line surveys, telecomms, weather monitoring, aerial imaging/mapping, TV news and sports coverage, movie making, environmental monitoring and oil and gas exploration — these are just some of the commercial areas where AUVSI anticipates that UAS will generate significant revenue.
Presentations and Sessions
The conference presentations began on Monday afternoon, and one paper that caught my eye was by Sierra Nevada (SNC) on its Fusion Filter, which is designed to take multiple sensor inputs and develop navigation and guidance for en-route, terminal approach and landing. This particle filter maintains thousands of weighted position estimates and refines them to provide a composite position and guidance output. Sensor inputs that SNC has used include 3D radar, lidar, FLIR IR camera, daytime camera, GPS/INS, and digital terrain elevation data (DTED). For landing applications, ~50 algorithms run to determine runway location with or without GPS/INS inputs. SNC has flown development flight tests on both fixed wing and rotor craft.
Tuesday began with a General Session headlined by Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.), House of Representatives; Lt. Gen. Kevin Mangum, deputy commanding general/chief of staff, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command; and Rep. Frank Lobiondo (R-N.J.), House of Representatives. In introducing these speakers, Ralf Alderson of AUVSI talked about the change from an industry basically serving the U.S. Department of Defense to a coming UAS commercial marketplace: “Time to start learning about the rest of the world,” he commented.
John Mica chaired the House Transportation Committee until 2012, and was one of the movers behind the government’s legislation that gave the FAA its 2015 deadline to integrate UAS into the National Airspace System (NAS). Mica’s disappointing advice was for us to now think in terms of 10-15 years before there would be complete UAS integration in the NAS, largely due delays in the name of safety by the FAA.
Lt. Gen. Kevin Mangum (Army three-star) began by telling us that the Army’s first UAV may have been the SD1 Drone used in Germany in 1960/61. He indicated that everything the Army does with UAS is basically focused on providing the soldier in the field with the tools he needs to be successful. He indicated how UAS are available at the various command levels, and gave us insight into progress with manned and unmanned teaming.
Frank Lobiondo is chairman of the House Aviation Subcommittee, which oversees the majority of programs of the FAA. He acknowledged that “The rest of the country is not tuned in” to the benefits of UAS, and “sensationalized media coverage only highlights (UAS) in a very negative way.” Nevertheless, Congress is desperate to see the potential economic impact of UAS unleashed, and will urge FAA to speed up the process.
Later on at the conference, almost as if in response to Lobiondo’s comments, FAA Manager of UAS Integration Jim Williams made a welcome announcement. Four companies have approached FAA for expedited UAS approvals, and the FAA is now working with them to expedite limited commercial operations before UAS rules are finalized. Limited commercial operations for filmmaking, power-line inspection, precision agriculture and flare-stack inspection are therefore expected to be soon authorized by FAA.
The next General Session featured presentations by Alaska Lt. Gov. Louis Mean Treadwell and futurist Mike Walsh. While Walsh’s presentation was entertaining and thought-provoking. Challenging almost all status quos for how to conduct business, Treadwell had more to say that was directly relevant for today’s UAS industry. “Do consumers get it, do they want it, do they fear it?” These were the messages Treadwell gave to his AUVSI audience. As a past technology and business start-up innovator, he had a lot to say about the suitability of Alaska for UAS testing and innovation. With 47,000 people working in aerospace in Alaska, and the recently FAA-awarded Alaska-Hawaii based Pan-Pacific Test Range; Treadwell encouraged the UAS industry to come and try Alaska.
Exhibit Floor Highlights UAS Opportunities
Meanwhile, the GNSS and navigation systems suppliers to the UAS industry were going about the business of the trade show — exhibiting and demonstrating their capabilities. Wandering purposefully around the huge show floor, I set about uncovering what was new and how people felt about UAS opportunities:
Septentrio:
Septentrio introduced a new RTK engine this year, which is better in occluded situations — such as under tree canopies or around downtown buildings. It has better scintillation detection and provides clearer warning indicators to users. The bottom line is that its RTK is more robust and works better.
Septentrio has also had some significant success with major dredging operators around the world. It has reduced convergence times for PPP, say when starting with an initial RTK position, and position accuracy degrades gracefully over 15-30 minutes.
Accord:
Accord is quite excited by the prospect of a new FAA TSO C-199, which when approved will establish equipment requirements for gliders, balloons and aircraft such as micro-lights, all without electrical systems. The TSO creates a new class of equipment, which is now referred to as Light Aircraft Surveillance Equipment (LASE). The aircraft targeted for equipage are currently exempt from the rule that mandates other aircraft should carry ADS-B — which broadcasts position and velocity, allowing others in the airspace to track and avoid your aircraft. So to improve safety, a simpler, less expensive ADS-B device is being called for that uses an off-the-shelf (non-certified) GNSS receiver as the position source. The point is if this GNSS is good enough for this special class of aircraft, why wouldn’t it be good enough for UAVs, which are so similar to these targeted aircraft?
Accord has a Micro-i GPS SBAS receiver for this application using a chip-level receiver called the Navika-300, which comes from its Indian technology partners. Accord claims that the Navika is comparable to other chip-level receivers in the market from CSR (Sirf) and u-blox.
Topcon:
Topcon has partnered with MAVinci from Germany to market the Sirius Basic and Pro aerial positioning system in Europe, and presumably this system will find its way into everywhere that Topcon does business.
Achieving 5-cm GNSS-RTK accuracy without traditional Ground Control Points (GCP) increases productivity. Removing the need for placement of GCPs can potentially reduce time for a survey project by up to 50 percent. This precise positioning technology allows image locations developed by Sirius Pro to be used as the equivalent of GCPs.
Trimble:
The Trimble UX-5 Aerial Imaging Rover was probably first on the market as a GNSS/UAS system for precision surveying. Following the acquisition of Gatewing, Trimble has been working hard to bring a fully capable UAS surveying solution to market.
The Trimble UX5 aerial image data is processed into deliverables by the new Trimble Business Center (TBC) photogrammetry module. Specialized computer-vision algorithms produce accurate results automatically, with minimal manual interaction. The UX-5 provides a stable and reliable photogrammetric system delivering excellent results without requiring specialized photogrammetry knowledge or experience.
Trimble also unveiled a new high-performance integrated UHF receiver at the chipset level ( 60 x 55 x 15 millimeters), designed for OEM integrations, UAS among them. The BD930-UHF supports both triple frequency from the GPS and GLONASS constellations plus dual frequency from BeiDou and Galileo, making it ready to take advantage of additional signals as GNSS grows and grows. The BD930-UHF delivers quick RTK initializations for 1–2 centimeter positioning. It also has an advanced kalman filter PVT engine positioning in urban canyons and the like, for applications not requiring centimeter-level accuracy. The receiver also supports fault detection and exclusion (FDE) and receiver autonomous integrity monitoring (RAIM) for safety-critical applications — sure to become increasingly important in the FAA-ruled airspace and coming regulations.
The Trimble BD930-UHF high-performance integrated UHF receiver.
NovAtel:
NovAtel announced the release of the new OEM617D receiver at AUVSI’s Unmanned Systems 2014. The OEM617D is a compact, dual-antenna, dual-frequency, single-card receiver offering NovAtel’s ALIGN heading functionality and RT-2 Real Time Kinematic (RTK) GNSS positioning technology, in both dynamic and static environments. The OEM617D provides dual-frequency operation with GPS, GLONASS and BeiDou signals and also tracks Galileo, SBAS and QZSS, maximizing GNSS availability globally. Fixed and rotary-wing aircraft/UAS, marine, and autonomous ground vehicles will benefit by integrating the OEM617D as well as other applications requiring precise position and heading accuracy.
Gladiator:
The Landmark 50 is a high-performance GPS/inertial product which comes in at the top of the Gladiator MEMS inertial product line. The LandMark 50 INS/GPS represents inertial performance on par with small ring laser and fiber-optic gyros. This performance leap with low-cost MEMS technology offers substantial improvement in performance utilizing the newest high-performance MEMS gyros and accelerometers combined with a 72-channel, 10-Hz update rate u-blox GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou, QZSS and SBAS receiver.
Geodetics:
Geodetics showed off a couple of new GPS/inertial products. The Geo-ReiNAV comes in both a commercial and a mil-spec (SAASM) version. As the team was at lengths to explain, Geodetics is GPS “agnostic” — which in today’s terminology means Geodetics uses a variety of OEM receivers in their products — the smarts are in the filter and processing. The other key component is a Seiko/EPSON G352/362 MEMS Quartz IMU, which apparently has less noise and lower drift (or more accurately “in-run bias stability”) than other silicon MEMS inertials.
Incidentally, we sat and discussed this material at the Geodetics booth, which seemed more spacious than in previous years — it was larger, as it spilled over into the next vacant booth which Hemisphere was supposed to have occupied — but having apparently reserved and paid, didn’t show up for the exhibition.
Sparton:
Sparton released news of the GAINS-10 Multi-GNSS assisted inertial navigation system at AUVSI this year. The unit excels in challenging environments. It provides accurate inertial navigation in the presence of mechanical shock, transient platform vibrations and extreme magnetic interference. The 10DOF IMU features high speed, synchronous sampling of all inertial systems combined with high rate coning and sculling compensation and is fully calibrated over temperature.
Vectornav:
The VN-300 is a miniature dual antenna GPS-aided INS system. The dual GPS adds heading determination, and the inertial aiding helps through potential GPS outages. A pressure sensor is also included for altitude determination. The VN-300 can be used in a wide variety of industrial and military applications and is well suited for size, weight, power and cost-constrained applications such as unmanned vehicle systems; antenna, camera and platform stabilization; heavy machinery monitoring; robotics; and primary or secondary flight navigation.
Oxford Scientific (OxTS):
Last year at AUVSI, Oxford introduced a miniature datalogging GPS/MEMS INS — this year it returned with the xNAV500, which is now real time. With dual GPS and antenna inputs, this unit also provides heading determination in a small form factor that is apparently very affordable.
MicroPilot:
One of the leading providers of autopilot systems for a large number of the UAS at the show, MicroPilot has not stood still during the last 12 months. The latest product addition is the MP2128³× triplex redundant autopilot using three high-performance 2128ɡ autopilot boards on one pcb. The advantage is that this autopilot is fault resistant, providing two additional back-up channels to resist critical function failure. A board-level option is available for integrators who want to combine functions in fewer on-board boxes.
UTC/Cloud Cap:
Cloud Cap is also one of the principle autopilot suppliers to the UAS industry. Cloud Cap appears to pack additional functions into its range of autopilots — including a core autopilot, flight sensors, navigation, wireless communications and interfaces providing data to the payload system. The Piccolo Nano is its smallest device, and has been mounted in a board stack on top of a Cloud Cap enclosure containing a NovAtel OEM615 used as the Nano GPS navigation source.
Overall on par with last year’s AUVSI conference in Washington, D.C., the Orlando venue probably encouraged more industry participation, but there seemed to be a lot fewer military people around. This probably accounts for what looks like reduced attendance over last year.
The GNSS/navigation exhibitors, however, were just as innovative as last year, and were present in good numbers. There was generally good traffic at most of these booths, so there are probably new customers coming directly from the show. What was the most notable new thing at the conference? For me, it was discovering the potential for a reduced scope of equipment certification — provided UAS could find a way to be included within the same class of aviation as balloons, micro-lights and gliders. This would really help bring more UAS with high-performance navigation into usable airspace — even unleashing the commercial potential that Congress and the industry need so badly.
From a weather perspective, Aberdeen, Scotland, may not be the most inviting location in the world in which to live. Nevertheless, Aberdeen is the leading European oil & gas business hub and is one of eight “super cities” spearheading the UK’s economy. But it’s waaaaay up north of the border with England on the east coast of Scotland — winter conditions can be difficult, even inhospitable at times. But if you want to transmit differential corrections out to shipping and oil rigs in the North Sea, it’s an ideal location.
Since its first beginnings in Aberdeen, Veripos has evolved to become a major worldwide business for marine, and now also for “precise land navigation, positioning and guidance solutions.” Veripos is now delivering augmentation services on a global basis, employs more than 130 specialist personnel based in 11 sites around the world, and in 2013 had revenues of more than $45 million. With a global ground network of more than 80 dual-redundant receiver base stations, Veripos now provides not only traditional differential GNSS transmissions, but also precise GPS and GLONASS orbit and clock corrections over seven Inmarsat GEOs and also via the Internet — we now call Precise Point Positioning (PPP).
Veripos ground receiver station network.
Veripos began in March 1989 as a joint venture between Brown & Root Survey and Ormston Technology, a specialist marine electronics company based in Hull, England. Initially, Veripos provided a conventional Differential Global Positioning Service (DGPS) for users in the North Sea based on HF radio transmitters.
Introducing a much broader satellite-based DGPS service in 1994, coverage was extended to cover the Gulf of Mexico followed by further expansion of the network/coverage into Brazil, West Africa, Mediterranean and Caspian Sea. Veripos became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Subsea 7 in the same period. Following a major expansion in late 2004, full global service coverage was achieved in 2005, and ultimately Veripos became the second largest precise satellite positioning services supplier in the world to the marine industry, with leading clients in exploration, seismic, construction, survey, offshore supply vessels (OSV) and offshore drilling. In late October 2012, Veripos diversified further, launching its TerraStar business to address the land and near-shore sector.
Achieving global accuracies of 5-10 centimeters using relatively small amounts of data, users worldwide are mostly able to accommodate the initial convergence time needed to achieve these higher accuracies. Veripos claims that using multiple constellations, convergence time can be down to less than 10 minutes — even lower for hot starts.
The “free” IGS data that competes with Veripos and other subscription correction providers is also pretty good, but it’s not generally used by commercial operations.
IGS Multi-GNSS Experiment Tracking Network.
IGS data is provided by academic and government sources around the world, and the advantage is not only free access, but also open data and multiple open-source software tools and data, all built to published open standards. But the IGS system is not a 24/7 reliable data source, and support can be a problem. It’s not designed for companies who must have service guarantees in order for them to consistently operate profitably in difficult conditions — it’s more experimental, for research and testing for the academic and government outfits that produce the data, along with a whole bunch of engineering teams who take advantage of free data and can cope with system hiccups for their R&D and for comparison purposes.
So Veripos and other commercial providers overcome the weaknesses of IGS by providing a worldwide network that is well maintained — an infrastructure designed for high reliability and availability. Each base station has dual-redundant receiver and communications links. There are three processing centers, two active and one on warm standby, that can each operate the whole system, and each of the processing centers has dual-redundant equipment. There are seven geostationary satellites with a large degree of coverage overlap, and Internet data feeds also provide a backup. More than these system design features, Veripos works directly with its customers to ensure successful integration of their corrections with customer operations and, above all, supports the customer directly during these operations. If the customer is not operational, Veripos recognizes that down time means lost profits for its customers, so its staff work hard to avoid any service interruptions.
It’s not clear what would happen to this currently stable marketplace if and when Galileo begins selling a commercial service on E6, but the existing commercial service providers are pretty sure that competition in their segment from a government provider that is publicly funded is not in their best interests. At the recent Munich Satellite Navigation Summit, Gian-Gherardo Calini from the European GNSS Agency certainly received a clear message from Trimble, NovAtel, Veripos and Fugro (to a lesser extent) that these companies do not believe that Galileo should be entering their market. However, Calini did state several times that the GNSS agency did not want to disrupt this market. How to do that when the Galileo infrastructure, control systems and satellites are wholly government funded remains unclear. Even if the service were wholesaled to a commercial provider, it’s unlikely that the retailer would have to bear the full cost of maintenance and support of the entire Galileo ground and space infrastructure, so their service would in effect be hugely subsidized.
Veripos recognized that focusing on its marine service alone is ignoring the land segment. So the company established a new business called TerraStar to address the land segment, just as Fugro had spun off OminSTAR for the land segment many years ago. TerraStar is still a division of Veripos, and the PPP infrastructure and distribution system it uses is the same. TerraStar is focused entirely on land and close-to-shore operations, so its business development and marketing is aimed at wholesaling its services through OEMs for these segments, while Veripos continues in parallel solely with marine and offshore.
Initial OEMs to sign up were Septentrio and Altus, which is a subsidiary of Septentrio that focuses on survey products and applications. Septentrio had a number of successes with DEME dredging and land reclamation in Belgium and terrascan airborne geophysical survey in South Africa and Germany.
Terrascan airborne geophysical survey.DEME land reclamation.
And here we arrive at the place where these companies all start to come together. In mid-March this year, Hexagon acquired Veripos, along with TerraStar. Hexagon is, of course, the parent that has NovAtel and Leica in its thoroughbred stable of GNSS industry leaders. Could this acquisition have something to do with John Deere/NavCom operating its own StarFire PPP system, or Trimble acquiring OmniSTAR from Fugro and now providing its own range of PPP correction services?
Well, NovAtel rolled out NovAtel Correct and new software at the end of March for its OEM6 high-precision receivers, which includes TerraStar’s precise point positioning (PPP) corrections. And NovAtel now has a closely associated company within the Hexagon stable, so a long-term association between NovAtel and Veripos/TerraStar is just about assured. And, with a big company group like Hexagon and many potential connections between group members with common interests, the prospect for continued investment as revenues increase means Veripos should be even better positioned going forward.
And, of course, adding NovAtel customers, including other potential OEM third parties, to the Veripos/TerraStar user base all helps both companies’ revenue and keeps their parent Hexagon happy too. So actually, it’s all about increasing the bottom line!
This month I am writing to you from Munich, where I have just attended the Munich Satellite Navigation Conference. I have written up the full Summit proceedings for GPS World’s new European GNSS & Earth Obersvation Report (EAGER) newsletter. You can read that (much longer) column here and while you’re at it, sign up for the new quarterly newsletter. What follows is an excerpt of it, specially focused on professional GNSS OEM interests.
I used to spend quite a lot of time in Munich working on a multi-national, multi-role fighter aircraft program, so returning for this year’s Munich Satellite Navigation Summit stirred some good memories for me. Held in the opulent Residenz Muenchen March 25-27, the conference always has a special atmosphere that these historic 1385 surroundings convey to the attendees.
Munich is in the Southern German state of Bavaria, and Bavaria has taken a real interest in the promotion and success of Galileo; witness the extensive Bavarian booth at recent European and North American GNSS conferences. Germany has, of course, been one of the principle nations providing significant funding for Galileo from its inception.
So with this backdrop, the summit brings together people involved with GNSS from around the world to report on the current status of GNSS and to relate how their participation in satellite navigation has progressed. And, of course, Europe, Germany, Bavaria and the European GNSS industry, which is now recognized around the world, all take the opportunity to present their capabilities and successes.
The first day’s session contained constellation updates from GPS, Galileo, Beidou and the UN International Committee on GNSS (ICG) — GLONASS delegates were notably absent. There was much speculation that they declined to attend due to the Crimean situation, and one U.S. delegate even inferred that they were “uninvited.” For the constellation updates, see the longer article referenced above.
Munich Highlights
A collection of examples of Bavarian GNSS innovations followed in a very interesting session led off by an overview of Business Incubation Centers and their collaboration with government agencies and research centers. Small business start-ups are apparently encouraged to apply during four annual time-slots, and receive two years’ incubation support and cash incentives. This has lead to 81 new ventures and has apparently been the source of the 1,000 new jobs mentioned by the Minister of Economic Affairs. The annual European Satellite Navigation Competition and Galileo Masters competition have also generated a whole bunch of ideas and concepts (8,000), some of which have found support through this incubation process.
Airbus Defence gave a short overview of the testing work it accomplished in supporting the first Galileo fix and has prepared several vehicle test platforms, ready to take the next phase of Galileo testing to the streets in realistic, real-world environments.
DLR provided insights into a number of its activities, namely:
Iono mapping
Signal distortion
Multipath
Jammer mitigation – adaptive antenna and processing
GNSS repeaters – how they can become unintentional jammers
Spoofer and Multipath inbvestigations
Antenna designs
GNSS evolution – Maser and clock combination benefits
Army University of Munich discussed radio science experiments in the Solar System and experiments using Mars Express (above) in polar orbit around Mars and resulting measurements of the moon Phobos. Internal and external outreach efforts with numerous organizations were also mentioned.
IFEN provided more down-to-Earth information on the on-going activities at the GATE ground-based pseudolite range, which has enabled realistic outdoors testing of Galileo receivers, well in advance of signals from orbiting satellites. Recent testing has now been able to include the four operating Galileo SVs on orbit with GATE pseudolite signals. GATE will continue to evolve over the next few years to keep up as more Galileo orbital signals come on-line.
Fraunhofer presented information on its 40-channel GPS/Galileo/GLONASS chip-receiver (above) – claiming 1-meter accuracy, low-cost, robust reliable position solution, small form-factor and low-power. Following PRS test-bed development efforts, Fraunhofer has now received a contract to also deliver 20 pre-operational Galileo PRS receivers for use in initial pilot projects.
GNSS Interference
Vidal Ashkenazi, in his inimitable form, lead a panel discussion on interference, jamming (in particular Personal Privacy Devices, or PPD) and spoofing, and coaxed his panel members to provide a whole bunch of information on what’s being done, mitigation capabilities and potential enforcement. Unlike all the other sessions, Vidal’s panel members didn’t use presentations, but rather responded to wide-ranging questions on the subject from the session chair. For a complete view of this, as well as a subsequent session on “Legal Impacts of Personal Privacy Devices (PPDs),” see the EAGER newsletter column.
Precise Point Positioning (PPP)
The group discussing PPP options consisted of the the European GNSS Agency (GSA, charged with exploitation of Galileo services), several principle industry service providers of PPP, and the federal agency, which provides PPP-like services in Germany.
The GSA presented its ideas concerning the provision of high-accuracy PPP corrections over the Galileo E6 signal – the so-called Commercial Service (CS). The intent, however, would not be to disrupt the commercial marketplace. Nevertheless, GSA is proposing a public-funded service to be sold to users within a market that is already well served by commercial worldwide service providers who charge users for cm-level PPP service.
And while Trimble made a polite presentation on the many levels of capabilities of its TerraSat services, as did Veripos and to some extent Fugro, it was clear that the commercial providers are not eager to find competition in their market from a government entity. NovAtel also chimed in on this conflict as it will be involved in Veripos/TerraStar, following its acquisition by Hexagon. Fugro appeared to be interested in acquiring rights to distribute CS on behalf of GSA.
The German federal agency promoted open data, source and standards from the IGS network to which it contributes: IGS is supported by numerous national agencies around the world. Orbit and clock PPP service is available 24/7 from multiple sources. However, the service is offered on a best efforts basis without a service guarantee, and cannot achieve the accuracies or convergence times of commercial services.
I talked subsequently with Michael Ritter, CEO of NovAtel, to learn the background to the Veripos/TerraStar acquisition. It’s clear that providing PPP services means added value to NovAtel when they sell receivers with PPP capability, so they will quickly discontinue offering Omnistar subscriptions and will shortly launch NovAtel Correct, offering Veripos (marine) and TerraStar (land) PPP subscription services. NovAtel is making significant inroads in the agriculture segment, and they see PPP service as an essential element of this and other businesses. The acquisition was worth something on the order of $200 million, so there is a vested interest in making these services pay and discouraging GSA entry into this market. Veripos will continue supplying other GNSS OEM receiver manufacturers — notably Septentrio, who use TerraStar services, now also NovAtel, and potentially another major GNSS manufacturer.
Future of GNSS in User Segment
Chaired by Greg Turetzky of Intel, this session opened the third day of the Summit. The presenters offered their concepts for current and future GNSS equipment and systems.
Stanford University outlined its work with FAA on an alternate PNT system to be used as a back-up to GNSS. It used to be that GNSS systems were designed to overcome space-weather effects and faults in equipment design or manufacture — nowadays, there are “bad guys” out there and we need to “protect, toughen and augment” these systems. Antennas can be built that impart a specific signature to the signals they transmit, and this may aid in finding and prosecuting the bad guys, but the main focus of work is development of a hybrid system using Distance Measuring Equipment (DME) and a pseudolite.
Tests have demonstrated good performance, and these prototype efforts could lead to aviation requirements (MOPS) development by 2018 and deployment by 2020.
Septentrio has been involved in Galileo since it began and was the first company with Galileo receivers. Nowadays, they have receivers fielded in multiple commercial applications, including machine control, maritime, aviation, automation, and measurement, delivering accuracies from a meter down to a centimeter. They will add E6 to their AsteRx family of multiple-channel, multi-frequency, multi-constellation receivers, and have developed a number of hardware and software mitigation techniques to combat jamming, interference and multipath, and to integrate receivers with inertial units for aiding.
Furuno is interested in resilient PNT for marine applications, and has examined the use of eLoran as an alternative to GPS, but has moved towards a system of radar beacons that detect radar pulses from passing ships and transmit their positions, enabling position determination. In tests, accuracies of around 2 meters have been obtained with two beacons.
Quascom’s approach is to add firewalls inside receivers, which toughen the processing and prevent distortion of position information. Quascom believes this will be necessary until authentication can be added into the GNSS system itself, so that any data received is validated and is known to be good.
Chris Rizos from the University of New South Wales, Australia, drew attention to the “holes” that exist in GNSS, and reviewed a number of possible “Band-Aid” fixes, such as Wi-Fi especially for indoor location. However, his solution seems to be to establish terrestrial networks transmitting GNSS-like signals.
Eurocontrol indicated that aircraft currently use inertial and DME extensively as a back-up to GNSS navigation. By 2030, there will be multiple constellations, and dual-frequency use should become commonplace in aviation, so GNSS navigation should be much more robust. Aircraft approaches are required to be in conformance with Required Navigation Performance (RNP), so would it be possible to develop RNP procedures for DME and inertial to be used as back-up during approaches in the event GNSS is disrupted?
To conclude the session, Airbus provided a “starter course” overview on inertial systems – how they work, the range of different types available, what they can achieve, costs, strengths and weaknesses and integration with GNSS.
The summit continued with subsequent sessions on:
Space technologies and users
GNSS monitoring of Earth and disaster management
Copernicus – Earth Observation
GNSS Education
Unfortunately, my deadline didn’t allow me to attend these equally interesting presentations.
There is also a manufacturers’ exhibit area at the summit that just fits into a couple of corridors near the main hall – around 20 booths. I talked with several of the manufacturers, including Spirent who has launched its latest GSS9000 multi-frequency-constellation simulator, with a four-fold increase in system iteration rate over the previous model. Exhibitors appeared to be pleased to be at the summit and by the level of interest shown by the attendees.
So, as this year’s Munich Summit concludes, where does this leave us? We’ve learned some new things about several GNSS topics and heard some interesting new concepts. Europe appears to be now focused on users and applications, to ensure there is market growth and use of Galileo. What stands out for me is the contrast between how European governments go about GNSS and how North America and the commercial world does the same thing without as much direct influence. This is nothing new, of course, it’s just the European way…
Galileo Growth, Constellation Updates, and Jamming
I used to spend quite a lot of time in Munich working on a multi-national, multi-role fighter aircraft program, so returning for this year’s Munich Satellite Navigation Summit stirred some good memories for me.
Held in the opulent Residenz Muenchen March 25-27, the conference always has a special atmosphere that these historic 1385 surroundings convey to the attendees. The former royal palace of Bavarian monarchs, the whole complex has ten courtyards and 130 rooms. The summit was held in the Max-Joseph Hall, which took a little bit of work to find at first, wandering around the huge complex. One wing of the building hosts a theater, and the mainhall is the primary concert venue for the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. Overall, this is a delightful setting.
Munich is in the Southern German state of Bavaria, and Bavaria has taken a real interest in the promotion and success of Galileo; witness the extensive Bavarian booth at recent European and North American GNSS conferences. Germany has, of course, been one of the principle nations providing significant funding for Galileo from its inception.
Ilse Aigner
So with this backdrop, the summit brings together people involved with GNSS from around the world to report on the current status of GNSS and to relate how their participation in satellite navigation has progressed. And, of course, Europe, Germany, Bavaria and the European GNSS industry, which is now recognized around the world, all take the opportunity to present their capabilities and successes.
The plenary session on the first evening covered GNSS, Earth Observation (EO) and Telecommunications — with the panel headed by Ilse Aigner, Bavarian State Minister of Economic Affairs and Media, Energy and Technology — an extensive mandate, even for a state-certified engineer who used to work for Eurocopter.
Dr. Merith Niehuss, speaking at the opening of the summit. (copyright: Munich Satellite Navigation Summit).
The host of the summit is actually the University of the German Army in Munich, and we received a warm welcome from two leading professors: Dr. Bernd Eissfeller and Dr. Merith Niehuss, the president. The theme of the summit was to move from implementation to utilization, and in typical European form, all parties were looking to shower potential users with funded solutions to problems of which users are not yet aware — so users clearly need government-provided education, pilot projects and funding. Not exactly a North American concept, where we tend to encourage users to buy our innovative stuff by demonstrating how it can save them money or earn them more revenue.
The European Commission, ESA, DLR, European GNSS Agency (GSA), Airbus, OHB, and Telespazio were also represented. The minister did indeed associate with and praise the local area, claimed 1,000 jobs created related to Galileo through an incubation center at Oberpfaffenhofen, and declared Bavarian support for satellite navigation.
Other important things mentioned by the panel at the plenary included an €11B budget for Galileo/EGNOS and Copernicus (EO project) under the Horizon 2020 program, and an intent to declare Early Service for Galileo before the end of this year with two or three dual Galileo satellite launches — the first two FOC (production) SVs should go to the European launch center in Kourou in April in preparation for launch around June. I heard in a corridor that launches may be planned for June, October and December, but an EU spokesman later said that there would only be two launches this year. OHB now has the contract to build 22 FOC Galileo SVs, each with a design life of 14 years, and they are bullish on their ability to deliver on time and budget.
The program continued the following day with constellation updates from GPS, Galileo, Beidou and the UN International Committee on GNSS (ICG) — GLONASS delegates were notably absent. There was much speculation that they declined to attend due to the Crimean situation, and one U.S. delegate even inferred that they were “uninvited.”
Constellation Updates
GPS: It’s estimated that there are ~2B GPS receivers in use, and there may be ~10B by 2020. A return on investment (ROI) analysis is currently underway, but a rough guess is that costs are in the tens of billions, while annual returns are of the order of $60-100B/year. Another IIF satellite (SV) launched last month, bringing the total to five SVs transmitting L1, L2C and L5, with seven more to come, and multiple launches are expected this year. There are 30 operational SVs on orbit, signal performance significantly exceeds the specs, and consistent, dependable performance has been provided for more than 20 years.
Galileo: First fix was achieved March 12, 2013, with four SVs, two (maybe three?) launches of two SVs each planned for 2014, and early operational capability to be declared by end of this year. €7B in funding is provisioned for 2014-2020, with 16-24 operational ground stations, Commercial Service (CS) planned by 2016 (more on this later), and a long-term evolution plan being worked up during this year.
BeiDou: Fourteen SVs are on orbit — five GEO, four MEO and five Inclined Geosynchronous Orbit (IGOS) satellites, providing dual-frequency services. Thirty total SVs are planned, and the intent is to provide open, compatible, interoperable signals with other GNSS free of charge. There was not much other news to report, other than that China intends to invest significantly in BeiDou to keep improving services.
United Nations ICG: Nine nations and European Union = International Committee on GNSS (ICG), with 20 other associate and observer States. Activities include GNSS compatibility/interoperability, GNSS enhancements, information sharing, and reference frames, timing and applications — lots of upcoming meetings and activities.
Regional and Augmentation Updates
WAAS: Phase IV is underway with GEO replenishment begun, introduction of L5 to replace L2, and replacement of obsolete component parts. One hundred GIII receivers were ordered with L1/L2C and L5 capability for delivery by September this year — and have capacity to also add Galileo. GIII receivers have already been fielded in six locations as part of initial integration testing. The Safety computer will also be upgraded starting this year. 3,912 LP/LPV approaches have been approved, of which 3,379 LPVs serve 1,667 airports. GBAS CAT I is progressing with four U.S. airport installations. System design approval began in January this year, and United Airlines has begun equipping over 90 B737/B787 for GPS approach and landing. Alternative Positioning, Navigation and Timing (APNT) investigations are underway (as a backup to GPS) with a hybrid DME-pseudolite configuration currently favored. Stanford University subsequently presented this and other concepts.
EGNOS: A €1.58B budget has been approved, and EGNOS V3 evolution is underway, with L1/L5 and GEO (SES 5 and Astra 5B) replenishment, a requirement to expand East and West and to the North to provide full coverage to all EU States.
About 100 EGNOS LPV approaches are approved — this year, it’s hoped to add 150 more.
QZSS: The operational concept has been proven with the first IGOS SV (Michibiki), so Japan is moving forward quickly to add another three SVs (3xIGOS and 1xGEO) and ultimately would like to have a total of seven SVs in orbit providing QZSS services. L1/L1C/L2C/L5 signals are identical to GPS, and L1s/L5s are augmentation signals, while L6 is proposed to be similar to Galileo E6, providing centimeter-level PPP-type service. QZSS essentially is intended to provide higher elevation satellites to improve urban navigation in dense cities.
IRNSS: Coverage extends 1500 km beyond India. The target is <20-meter accuracy, and signals are in L5 and S band and can be used independently or in dual-frequency combinations. A second IRNSS-1B GEO satellite is scheduled to launch on April 4.
GAGAN: The Indian SBAS was commissioned and certified in February this year with a number of ground stations, redundant uplinks and two on-orbit GSAT 8 and 10 GEOs. Gagan is now qualified to provide RNP0.1 (navigation accuracy to 0.1 miles).
QZSS and Japan’s Space Policy
This session provided some detail on how changes in Japan’s Basic Space Law has lead to efforts to expand the use of space and derive further economic benefits that this provides.
Munich Highlights
A collection of examples of Bavarian GNSS innovations followed in a very interesting session led off by an overview of Business Incubation Centers and their collaboration with government agencies and research centers. Small business start-ups are apparently encouraged to apply during four annual time-slots, and receive two years’ incubation support and cash incentives. This has lead to 81 new ventures and has apparently been the source of the 1,000 new jobs mentioned by the Minister of Economic Affairs. The annual European Satellite Navigation Competition and Galileo Masters competition have also generated a whole bunch of ideas and concepts (8,000), some of which have found support through this incubation process.
Airbus Defence gave a short overview of the testing work it accomplished in supporting the first Galileo fix and has prepared several vehicle test platforms, ready to take the next phase of Galileo testing to the streets in realistic, real-world environments.
DLR provided insights into a number of its activities, namely:
Iono mapping
Signal distortion
Multipath
Jammer mitigation – adaptive antenna and processing
GNSS repeaters – how they can become unintentional jammers
Spoofer and Multipath inbvestigations
Antenna designs
GNSS evolution – Maser and clock combination benefits
Army University of Munich discussed radio science experiments in the Solar System and experiments using Mars Express (above) in polar orbit around Mars and resulting measurements of the moon Phobos. Internal and external outreach efforts with numerous organizations were also mentioned.
IFEN provided more down-to-Earth information on the on-going activities at the GATE ground-based pseudolite range, which has enabled realistic outdoors testing of Galileo receivers, well in advance of signals from orbiting satellites. Recent testing has now been able to include the four operating Galileo SVs on orbit with GATE pseudolite signals. GATE will continue to evolve over the next few years to keep up as more Galileo orbital signals come on-line.
Fraunhofer presented information on its 40-channel GPS/Galileo/GLONASS chip-receiver (above) – claiming 1-meter accuracy, low-cost, robust reliable position solution, small form-factor and low-power. Following PRS test-bed development efforts, Fraunhofer has now received a contract to also deliver 20 pre-operational Galileo PRS receivers for use in initial pilot projects.
GNSS Interference
Vidal Ashkenazi, in his inimitable form, lead a panel discussion on interference, jamming (in particular Personal Privacy Devices, or PPD) and spoofing, and coaxed his panel members to provide a whole bunch of information on what’s being done, mitigation capabilities and potential enforcement. Unlike all the other sessions, Vidal’s panel members didn’t use presentations, but rather responded to wide-ranging questions on the subject from the session chair.
David Turner, representing the U.S. State Department, indicated that the ICG will meet shortly in Geneva hosted by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to focus on interference, jamming and mitigation. The recourse that nations have for use of PPDs by their people is the law — jammers are illegal, sale and purchase of them is illegal — however, Internet sales are very difficult to police. So detection and mitigation are required to find and shut them down. Dave’s presentation on the GPS.gov website indicates that the ICG is working on an education program for states to inform about GNSS sensitivity to interference and the threat to critical infrastructure if they are allowed to operate. The ICG also has a task force on detection, reporting and systems development.
ISRO indicated that PPD jammers in India are restricted, but permitted for gatherings such as at churches where personal safety may be an issue. Ground-based detection is needed, as well as stronger legal protection that may well prohibit use of PPDs altogether.
Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) indicated that it is working on “signal proofing” for QZSS.
BeiDou said it is building a monitor network in China that will detect jamming.
There was a general discussion on whether receiver manufacturers should be mandated to make receivers that are resilient to jamming – many thought that there have already been significant advances in that direction by manufacturers. The normal approach would be to develop requirements with industry, agency and user inputs, publish them, and call up the requirements in equipment specifications. In the U.S., the Department of Homeland Security is seeking an approach to detection and location.
Legal Impacts of Personal Privacy Devices (PPDs)
While the audience may have had high hopes that the legal eagles could come up with some magic prevention and prosecution solution, the next session was more of a legal background briefing without any concrete conclusions (quite similar to other discussions I’ve had with some lawyers in the past, actually).
The first briefing was from the European Commission/European Union, who indicated that the EU doesn’t own the frequency rights to Galileo (Oh Oh…). They have to operate through a member state, which gets the rights through the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and then licenses use to the EU — the bottom line being that EU enforcement of jamming protection laws maybe be difficult, as the legal framework only exists at the national level for each state. The EU is trying to get recognition under another class of ITU membership.
EU regulations were presented that state that GNSS re-transmitters can only be operated legally by governments or government contractors. Or can be used indoors for indoor navigation, but only for emergency services at fixed sites which are pre-approved. Pseudolites can only be operated indoors, and there should be no interference to other systems. Jammers are forbidden and cannot be placed on the market for sale.
Eurocontrol had a lot to say about the impact on aviation navigation infrastructure and receivers on aircraft. Existing ground nav aids have limitations, the worldwide equipment infrastructure is becoming quite old — aviation has generally moved away to GNSS and inertial based navigation and uses ground navaids as backup. There is a conflict between regulating GNSS heavily for aviation and how people want to use it in the commercial world. We may have to consider a trade-off between heavily restricted GNSS operations, and wide open commercial GNSS applications.
David Sobel, from Electronic Frontier Foundation in the U.S., presented the contrary case for individual privacy. His argument is that sale of tracking devices is unregulated and can readily be purchased, so people may presumably use them to track others, thereby infringing their privacy. So why shouldn’t people be able to “defend their privacy” by use of PPDs?
Say an employer insists that a vehicle you are driving have a tracking device so he knows where you are. Isn’t the driver also justified in trying to protect his privacy? Since the police in the U.S. can no longer place tracking equipment on suspect vehicles without a warrant, tracking appears to be down to private individuals or companies, who it would appear, have the legal ability to attach tracking devices under most circumstances. So the argument goes that if people have a legitimate concern about privacy, there should be acceptable provisions to allow them to disrupt tracking.
If there is a service such as road tolling, there is an incentive for people to avoid these costs. So systems should be robust enough to avoid disruption. Enforcement is a problem — should police chase people they suspect have jammers, or should they rather chase criminals or help and protect citizens? Mitigation systems need testing, so to test these systems there has to be jamming transmission — which needs to be controlled and regulated. Restricting the import of bad devices into a country might be desired, but the manufacturing countries don’t tend to want to restrict exports as exports help their economy. Again, the argument seems to be that of personal privacy over potential risks and damages to society.
No solutions, but a healthy discussion of views from a legal perspective.
Precise Point Positioning (PPP)
The group discussing PPP options consisted of the GSA (charged with exploitation of Galileo services), several principle industry service providers of PPP, and the federal agency, which provides PPP-like services in Germany.
The GSA presented its ideas concerning the provision of high-accuracy PPP corrections over the Galileo E6 signal – the so-called Commercial Service (CS). The intent, however, would not be to disrupt the commercial marketplace. Nevertheless, GSA is proposing a public-funded service to be sold to users within a market that is already well served by commercial worldwide service providers who charge users for cm-level PPP service.
And while Trimble made a polite presentation on the many levels of capabilities of its TerraSat services, as did Veripos and to some extent Fugro, it was clear that the commercial providers are not eager to find competition in their market from a government entity. NovAtel also chimed in on this conflict as it will be involved in Veripos/TerraStar, following its acquisition by Hexagon. Fugro appeared to be interested in acquiring rights to distribute CS on behalf of GSA.
The German Federal agency promoted open data, source and standards from the IGS network to which it contributes: IGS is supported by numerous national agencies around the world. Orbit and clock PPP service is available 24/7 from multiple sources. However, the service is offered on a best efforts basis without a service guarantee, and cannot achieve the accuracies or convergence times of commercial services.
I talked subsequently with Michael Ritter, CEO of NovAtel, to learn the background to the Veripos/TerraStar acquisition. It’s clear that providing PPP services means added value to NovAtel when they sell receivers with PPP capability, so they will quickly discontinue offering Omnistar subscriptions and will shortly launch NovAtel Correct, offering Veripos (marine) and TerraStar (land) PPP subscription services. NovAtel is making significant inroads in the agriculture segment, and they see PPP service as an essential element of this and other businesses. The acquisition was worth something on the order of $200 million, so there is a vested interest in making these services pay and discouraging GSA entry into this market. Veripos will continue supplying other GNSS OEM receiver manufacturers — notably Septentrio, who use TerraStar services, now also NovAtel, and potentially another major GNSS manufacturer.
Future of GNSS in User Segment
Chaired by Greg Turetzky of Intel, this session opened the third day of the Summit. The presenters offered their concepts for current and future GNSS equipment and systems.
Stanford University outlined its work with FAA on an alternate PNT system to be used as a back-up to GNSS. It used to be that GNSS systems were designed to overcome space-weather effects and faults in equipment design or manufacture — nowadays, there are “bad guys” out there and we need to “protect, toughen and augment” these systems. Antennas can be built that impart a specific signature to the signals they transmit, and this may aid in finding and prosecuting the bad guys, but the main focus of work is development of a hybrid system using Distance Measuring Equipment (DME) and a pseudolite.
Tests have demonstrated good performance, and these prototype efforts could lead to aviation requirements (MOPS) development by 2018 and deployment by 2020.
Septentrio has been involved in Galileo since it began and was the first company with Galileo receivers. Nowadays, they have receivers fielded in multiple commercial applications, including machine control, maritime, aviation, automation, and measurement, delivering accuracies from a meter down to a centimeter. They will add E6 to their AsteRx family of multiple-channel, multi-frequency, multi-constellation receivers, and have developed a number of hardware and software mitigation techniques to combat jamming, interference and multipath, and to integrate receivers with inertial units for aiding.
Furuno is interested in resilient PNT for marine applications, and has examined the use of eLoran as an alternative to GPS, but has moved towards a system of radar beacons that detect radar pulses from passing ships and transmit their positions, enabling position determination. In tests, accuracies of around 2 meters have been obtained with two beacons.
Quascom’s approach is to add firewalls inside receivers, which toughen the processing and prevent distortion of position information. Quascom believes this will be necessary until authentication can be added into the GNSS system itself, so that any data received is validated and is known to be good.
Chris Rizos from the University of New South Wales, Australia, drew attention to the “holes” that exist in GNSS, and reviewed a number of possible “Band-Aid” fixes, such as Wi-Fi especially for indoor location. However, his solution seems to be to establish terrestrial networks transmitting GNSS-like signals.
Eurocontrol indicated that aircraft currently use inertial and DME extensively as a back-up to GNSS navigation. By 2030, there will be multiple constellations, and dual-frequency use should become commonplace in aviation, so GNSS navigation should be much more robust. Aircraft approaches are required to be in conformance with Required Navigation Performance (RNP), so would it be possible to develop RNP procedures for DME and inertial to be used as back-up during approaches in the event GNSS is disrupted?
To conclude the session, Airbus provided a “starter course” overview on inertial systems – how they work, the range of different types available, what they can achieve, costs, strengths and weaknesses and integration with GNSS.
The summit continued with subsequent sessions on:
Space technologies and users
GNSS monitoring of Earth and disaster management
Copernicus – Earth Observation
GNSS Education
Unfortunately, my deadline didn’t allow me to attend these equally interesting presentations.
There is also a manufacturers’ exhibit area at the summit that just fits into a couple of corridors near the main hall – around 20 booths. I talked with several of the manufacturers, including Spirent who has launched its latest GSS9000 multi-frequency-constellation simulator, with a four-fold increase in system iteration rate over the previous model. Exhibitors appeared to be pleased to be at the summit and by the level of interest shown by the attendees.
So, as this year’s Munich Summit concludes, where does this leave us? We’ve learned some new things about several GNSS topics and heard some interesting new concepts. Europe appears to be now focused on users and applications, to ensure there is market growth and use of Galileo. What stands out for me is the contrast between how European governments go about GNSS and how North America and the commercial world does the same thing without as much direct influence. This is nothing new, of course, it’s just the European way…
The Munich Satellite Navigation Summit annually gathers people involved with GNSS from around the world to report on current status and progress of the multiple systems. It is a high-level briefing of significant global importance. Of course Europe, Germany, Bavaria, and the European GNSS industry, now recognized around the world, all take the opportunity to present their capabilities and successes.
This year’s Summit covered a lot of ground, and I’ve tried to do it justice in this column. For an overview, here are the main topics covered in what follows:
Opening Plenary
Constellation Updates
Regional and Augmentation Updates
Bavarian Highlights
GNSS Interference
Legal impacts of Personal Privacy Devices (PPDs)
Precise Point Positioning (PPP)
Future of GNSS in the User Segment
I used to spend quite a lot of time in Munich working on a multi-national, multi-role fighter aircraft program, so returning for this year’s Summit stirred some good memories for me.
Held in the opulent Residenz Muenchen, the conference derives a special atmosphere from these historic surroundings, some dating back to 1385. The former royal palace of Bavarian monarchs, the labyrinthine palace has ten courtyards and 130 rooms. Overall, this is a delightful setting.
Regional Flavor. Munich is in the southern German state of Bavaria, and Bavaria has taken a real interest in the promotion and success of Galileo; witness the expansive Bavarian booth at recent European and North American GNSS conferences, and the siting of a Galileo control center in Oberpfaffenhoffen, once a sleepy village in the Bavarian countryside 20 kilometers outside Munich, but now a significant high-tech research center with many aerospace facilities. Germany has of course been one of the lead nations funding Galileo from its inception.
Opening Plenary: A View from the Top
The host of the Summit is actually the University of the German Federal Army in Munich, and we received a warm welcome from two leading professors – Dr. Eissfeller and Dr. Niehuss, the president.
The theme of the Summit is to move from implementation to utilization, and in typical European form, all parties were looking to shower potential users with funded solutions to problems of which users are not yet aware — so users clearly need government-provided education, pilot projects, and funding. Not exactly a North American concept, where we tend to encourage users to buy our innovative stuff by demonstrating how it can save them money or earn them more revenue. But there’s a city called Rome over here . . .
The opening plenary session covered GNSS, Earth Observation (EO) and Telecommunications — an extensive mandate — with a panel headed by Ilse Aigner, Bavarian State Minister of Economic Affairs and Media, Energy and Technology, an equally extensive portfolio, even for a state-certified engineer who used to work for Eurocopter.
The European Commission, the European Space Agency (ESA), the German Aerospace Agency (DLR), the European GNSS Agency (GSA), and leading manufacturers Airbus, OHB (providers of the Galileo full-operational capability (FOC) satellites), and Telespazio were also represented. The Minister did indeed associate with and praise the local area, claimed 1,000 jobs created related to Galileo through an incubation center at Oberpfaffenhofen, and declared whole-hearted Bavarian support for satellite navigation.
Among important matters mentioned by the plenary panel:
an €11 billion budget for Galileo/EGNOS and Copernicus (an EO project) under the Horizon 2020 program;
an intent to declare Early Service for Galileo before the end of this year with two or three dual Galileo satellite launches.
Two Launches this Year. The first two FOC (production) SVs should go to the European launch center in Kourou in April in preparation for launch around June. I heard in a corridor that launches may be planned for June, October and December, but an EU spokesman later said that there would only be two launches this year. OHB now has the contract to build 22 FOC Galileo SVs, each with a design life of 14 years, and they are bullish on their ability to deliver on time and budget.
Constellation Updates
GPS. An estimated 2 billion GPS receivers are in use, and there may be ~10 billion by 2020. A return-on-investment (RoI) analysis is currently underway, but a rough guess is that costs are in the tens of $Billions, while annual returns are of the order of $60–100B/year. Another IIF satellite (SV) launched last month brought the total to 5 SVs transmitting L1, L2C, and L5 – with 7 more to come, and multiple launches are expected this year. There are 30 operational SVs on orbit. Signal performance significantly exceeds the specs, and consistent, dependable performance has been provided for more than 20 years.
Galileo. First fix achieved 12 March, 2013 with four SVs, two (maybe three?) launches of two SVs each planned for 2014 & early operational capability to be declared by end of this year. €7B funding provisioned for 2014-2020, 16-24 operational ground stations, Commercial Service (CS) planned by 2016 (more on this later), and a long-term evolution plan is being worked up during this year.
BeiDou. 14 SVs are on orbit: 5 geosynchronous orbit (GEO), 4 mid-Earth orbit (MEO) similar to GPS and other GNSS birds, and 5 inclined geosynchronous orbit (IGSO), together providing dual-frequency services. 30 total SVs are planned, and the intent is to provide open, compatible, interoperable signals with other GNSS, free of charge. There was not much other news to report, other than China intends to invest significantly in BeiDou to keep improving services.
GLONASS. Russian delegates were notably absent, and there was much speculation that they declined to attend due to the Crimean situation. One U.S. delegate even inferred that they were ‘un-invited.’
United Nations ICG. Nine nations and the European Union = International Committee on GNSS (ICG), with 20 other associate and observer states. Activities include GNSS compatibility/interoperability, GNSS enhancements, information sharing, and reference frames, timing & applications – lots of upcoming meetings and activities (see associated story).
Regional & Augmentation Updates
WAAS (the U.S. Wide Area Augmentation System). Phase IV is underway with GEO replenishment begun, introduction of L5 to replace L2, and replacement of obsolete component parts. 100 GIII receivers were ordered with L1/L2C and L5 capability for delivery by September this year– and have capacity to also add Galileo. GIII receivers have already been fielded in six locations as part of initial integration testing. The Safety computer will also be upgraded starting this year. 3,912 LP/LPV approaches have been approved, of which 3,379 LPVs serve 1,667 Airports.
GBAS CAT I is progressing with four US airport installations, system design approval began in January this year, and United Airlines has begun equipping more than 90 B737/B787 for GPS approach and landing. Alternative Positioning, Navigation and Timing (APNT) investigations are underway (as a backup to GPS) with a hybrid DME-pseudolite configuration currently favored. Stanford University subsequently presented this and other concepts.
EGNOS (the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service). €1.58B budget approved, EGNOS V3 evolution is underway – introduction of L1/L5 and GEO (SES 5 and Astra 5B) replenishment, a requirement to expand East and West and to the North to provide full coverage to all EU States.There are ~100 EGNOS LPV approaches approved, this year it is hoped to add 150 more.
QZSS (Japan’s Quasi-Zenith Satellite System). Operational concept has been proven with 1st IGSO SV (Michibiki), so Japan is moving forward quickly to add another 3 SVs (3xIGSO and 1xGEO) and ultimately would like to have a total of seven SVs in orbit providing QZSS services. L1/L1C/L2C/L5 signals are identical to GPS and L1s/L5s are augmentation signals, while L6 is proposed to be similar to Galileo E6, providing cm level PPP type service. QZSS essentially is intended to provide higher-elevation satellites to improve urban navigation in dense cities.
IRNSS (Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System). Coverage extends 1500 kilometers beyond India’s land area, target is <20m accuracy, signals are in L5 and S band and can be used independently or in dual frequency combinations. A 2nd IRNSS-1B GEO satellite is scheduled to launch on April 4th.
GAGAN – The Indian SBAS was commissioned and certified in February this year with a number of ground stations, redundant uplinks and two on-orbit GSAT 8 & 10 GEOs. Gagan is now qualified to provide RNP0.1 (navigation accuracy to 0.1 miles).
Bavarian Highlights
A collection of examples of Bavarian GNSS innovations followed in a very interesting session led off by an overview of Business Incubation Centers and their collaboration with government agencies and research centers. Small business start-ups are encouraged to apply during four annual time-slots, and receive two years’ incubation support and cash incentives. This has lead to 81 new ventures and has apparently been the source of the 1,000 new jobs mentioned by the Minister of Economic Affairs.
The annual European Satellite Navigation Competition and Galileo Masters competition have also generated a large number of ideas and concepts (8,000), some of which have found support through this incubation process.
Airbus Defence gave a short overview of the testing work they accomplished in supporting the first Galileo fix. The company fix has prepared several vehicle test platforms, ready to take the next phase of Galileo testing to the streets in realistic, real-world environments.
DLR provided insights into a number of their activities, namely: Iono mapping; signal distortion; multipath; jammer mitigation – adaptive antenna and processing; GNSS repeaters – how they can become unintentional jammers; spoofer and multipath investigations; antenna designs; GNSS evolution – maser and clock combination benefits.
IFEN provided information on the activities at the GATE ground-based pseudolite range, which has enabled realistic outdoors testing of Galileo receivers, well in advance of signals from orbiting satellites. Recent testing has now been able to include the four operating Galileo SVs on orbit with GATE pseudolite signals. GATE will continue to evolve over the next few years to keep up as more Galileo orbital signals come on-line.
Fraunhofer presented information on their 40-channel GPS/Galileo/GLONASS chip-receiver, claiming 1m accuracy, low-cost, robust reliable position solution, small form-factor and low-power. Following PRS test-bed development efforts, Fraunhofer has now received a contract to also deliver 20 pre-operational Galileo PRS receivers for use in initial pilot projects.
GNSS Interference
Vidal Ashkenazi, in his inimitable form, led a panel discussion on interference, jamming (in particular personal privacy devices (PPD)) and spoofing, and coaxed his panel members to provide a quantity of information on what’s being done, mitigation capabilities and potential enforcement. Unlike all the other sessions, panel members did not use presentations, instead responding to some wide-ranging questions on the subject from the session chair.
David Turner, representing the U.S. Department of State, indicated that the ICG will meet shortly in Geneva hosted by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to focus on interference, jamming and mitigation. The recourse that nations have for use of PPDs by their people is the law — jammers are illegal, sale and purchase of them is illegal — however internet sales are very difficult to police. So detection and mitigation are required to find and shut them down. Dave’s presentation on the GPS.gov website indicates that the ICG is working on an education program for States to inform about GNSS sensitivity to interference and the threat to critical infrastructure if they are allowed to operate. The ICG also has a task force on detection, reporting and systems development.
The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) indicated that PPD jammers in India are restricted but permitted for gatherings such as at churches where personal safety may be an issue. Ground-based detection is needed and stronger legal protection which may well prohibit use of PPDs altogether.
Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) indicated that they are working on ‘signal proofing’ for QZSS.
BeiDou said that they are building a monitor network in China which will detect jamming.
There was a general discussion on whether receiver manufacturers should be mandated to make receivers which are resilient to jamming. Many thought that there have already been significant advances in the direction by manufacturers. The normal approach would be to develop requirements with industry, agency and user inputs, publish them and call up the requirements in equipment specifications. In the United States, the Department of Homeland Security is seeking an approach to detection and location.
Legal impacts of Personal Privacy Devices (PPDs)
While the audience may have had high hopes that the ‘Legal Eagles’ could come up with some magic prevention and prosecution solution, the next session was more of a legal background briefing, without any concrete conclusions (quite similar to other discussions I’ve had with some lawyers in the past, actually).
The first briefing was from the European Commission/European Union who indicated that the EU doesn’t own the frequency rights to Galileo (uh-oh). They have to operate through a member state, which gets the rights through the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and then licenses use to the EU – the bottom line being that EU enforcement of jamming protection laws maybe be difficult, as the legal framework only exists at the national level for each State. The EU is trying to get recognition under another class of ITU membership.
EU regulations were presented, stating that GNSS re-transmitters can only be operated legally by governments or government contractors. Or can be used indoors for indoor navigation, but only for emergency services at fixed sites which are pre-approved. Pseudolites can only be operated indoors,and there should be no interference to other systems. Jammers are forbidden and cannot be placed on the market for sale.
Eurocontrol had a lot to say about the impact on aviation navigation infrastructure and receivers on aircraft. Existing ground nav aids have limitations, the world-wide equipment infrastructure is becoming quite old, aviation has generally moved away to GNSS and inertial based navigation, and uses ground navaids as backup. There is a conflict between regulating GNSS heavily for aviation and how people want to use it in the commercial world. We may have to consider a trade-off between heavily restricted GNSS operations, and wide open commercial GNSS applications.
David Sobel from Electronic Frontier Foundation in the United States presented the contrary case for individual privacy. His argument is that sale of tracking devices is unregulated and can readily be purchased, so people may presumably use them to track others, thereby infringing their privacy. So why shouldn’t people be able to ‘defend their privacy’ by use of PPDs?
Say an employer insists that a vehicle you are driving have a tracking device so he knows where you are, isn’t the driver also justified in trying to protect his privacy? Since U.S. police can no longer place tracking equipment on suspect vehicles without a warrant, tracking appears to be down to private individuals or companies, who it would appear, have the legal ability to attach tracking devices under most circumstances. So the argument goes that if people have a legitimate concern about privacy, there should be acceptable provisions to allow them to disrupt tracking.
If there is a service such as road tolling, there is an incentive for people to avoid these costs. So systems should be robust enough to avoid disruption. Enforcement is a problem. Should police chase people they suspect have jammers, or should they rather chase criminals or help and protect citizens? Mitigation systems need testing, so to test these systems there has to be jamming transmission, which needs to be controlled and regulated. Restricting the import of bad devices into a country might be desired, but the manufacturing countries don’t tend to want to restrict exports, as exports help their economy. Again, the argument seems to be that of personal privacy over potential risks and damages to society.
No solutions, but a healthy discussion of views from a legal perspective.
Precise Point Positioning (PPP)
The group discussing PPP options consisted of the GSA (charged with exploitation of Galileo services), several principal industry service providers of PPP, and the Federal agency which provides PPP-like services in Germany.
The GSA presented its ideas concerning the provision of high-accuracy PPP corrections over the Galileo E6 signal – the so called Commercial Service (CS). The intent however would not be to disrupt the commercial market-place. Nevertheless, GSA is proposing a public-funded service to be sold to users within a market that is already well served by commercial worldwide service providers who charge users for cm-level PPP service.
While Trimble made a polite presentation on the many levels of capabilities of their TerraSat services, as did Veripos and to some extent Fugro, it was clear that the commercial providers are not eager to find competition in their market from a government entity. NovAtel also chimed in on this conflict as it will be involved in Veripos/TerraStar, following the acquisition of the latter by Hexagon, which also owns the former. Fugro appeared to be interested in acquiring rights to distribute CS on behalf of GSA.
The German Federal agency promoted open data, source and standards from the IGS network to which they contribute: IGS is supported by numerous national agencies around the world. Orbit and Clock PPP service is available 24/7 from multiple sources. However, the service is offered on a best-efforts basis without a service guarantee and cannot achieve the accuracies or convergence times of commercial services.
I talked subsequently with Michael Ritter, CEO of NovAtel to learn the background to the Veripos/TerraStar acquisition. It is clear that providing PPP services means added-value to NovAtel when it sells receivers with PPP capability, so it will quickly discontinue offering Omnistar subscriptions and will launch ‘NovAtel Correct’ shortly, offering Veripos (marine) and TerraStar (land) PPP subscription services. NovAtel is making significant inroads in the agriculture segment and sees PPP service as an essential element of this and other businesses. The acquisition was worth something on the order of $200 million, so there is a vested interest in making these services pay, and discouraging GSA entry into this market. Veripos will continue supplying other GNSS OEM receiver manufacturers — notably Septentrio — who use TerraStar services, now adding NovAtel, and potentially another major GNSS manufacturer.
Future of GNSS in User Segment
Chaired by Greg Turetzky of Intel, this session opened the third day of the Summit. The presenters offered their concepts for current and future GNSS equipment and systems.
Stanford University outlined its work with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administratin (FAA) on an alternate PNT system to be used as a back-up to GNSS. It used to be that GNSS systems were designed to overcome ‘space-weather’ effects and faults in equipment design or manufacture. Nowadays there are ‘bad-guys’ out there and we need to ‘protect, toughen and augment’ these systems. Antennas can be built which impart a specific signature to the signals they transmit, and this may aid in finding and prosecuting the bad guys, but the main focus of work is development of a hybrid system using Distance Measuring Equipment (DME) and a pseudolite.
Tests have demonstrated good performance and these prototype efforts could lead to aviation requirements (MOPS) development by 2018 and deployment by 2020.
Septentrio has been involved in Galileo since it began and was the first company with Galileo receivers. Nowadays it fields receivers in multiple commercial applications including machine control, maritime, aviation, automation, and measurement, delivering accuracies from a meter down to a centimeter. It will add E6 to the AsteRx family of multiple-channel, multi-frequency, multi-constellation receivers, has developed a number of hardware and software mitigation techniques to combat jamming, interference and multipath, and integrate receivers with inertial units for aiding.
Furuno is interested in resilient PNT for marine applications, and has examined the use of eLoran as an alternative to GPS, but has moved towards a system of radar beacons that detect radar pulses from passing ships and transmit their position, enabling position determination. In tests, accuracies of around 2 meters have been obtained with two beacons.
Quascom adds ‘firewalls’ inside receivers which ‘toughen’ the processing and prevent distortion of position information. It believes this will be necessary until authentication can be added into the GNSS system itself, so that any data received is validated and is known to be good.
Chris Rizos from the University of New South Wales, Australia drew attention to the ‘holes’ that exist in GNSS and reviewed a number of possible ‘band-aid’ fixes, such as WiFi especially for indoor location. However his solution seems to be to establish terrestrial networks transmitting GNSS-like signals.
Eurocontrol indicated that aircraft currently use inertial and DME extensively as a back-up to GNSS navigation. By 2030 there will be multiple constellations, and dual-frequency use should become commonplace in aviation, so GNSS navigation should be much more robust. Aircraft approaches are required to be in conformance with Required Navigation Performance (RNP), so would it be possible to develop RNP procedures for DME and Inertial to be used as back-up during approaches in the event GNSS is disrupted?
To conclude the session, Airbus provided a ‘starter-course’ overview on inertial systems – how they work, the range of different types available, what they can achieve, costs, strengths and weaknesses and integration with GNSS.
The Summit continued with subsequent sessions on: space technologies and users; GNSS monitoring of Earth and disaster management; Copernicus – Earth Observation; GNSS Education. Unfortunately neither the space available here nor my deadline allowed me to attend these equally interesting presentations.
A manufacturers’ exhibit area at the Summit fits into a couple of corridors near the main Hall, around 20 booths. I talked with several of the manufacturers, including Spirent who has launched its latest GSS9000 multi-frequency-constellation simulator, with a four-fold increase in system iteration rate over the previous model. Exhibitors appeared to be pleased to be at the Summit and the level of interest shown by the attendees.
As this year’s Munich Summit concludes, where does it leave us? We’ve learned some new things about several GNSS topics and heard some interesting new concepts. Europe appears to be now focused on users and applications, to ensure there is market growth and use of Galileo.
What stands out for me is the contrast between how European governments go about GNSS and how North America and the commercial world does the same thing without as much direct influence. This is nothing new of course, it is simply the European way.
——————–
Tony Murfin is GPS World’s contributing editor for the Professional OEM e-newsletter.
