Tag: Fugro

Fugro Upgrades EZ-FRISK Seismic Hazard Analysis Software

Fugro has released an upgrade to its EZ-FRISK package — seismic hazard analysis software used by consultants and academics. The new upgrade includes the Next Generation West 2 ground motion prediction models, and improved user interface along with software fixes.

By early 2015, the software will incorporate the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) 2014 National Seismic Hazard Maps for the continental U.S., with the exception of California, and will include the Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast (UCERF) version 2. Fugro provides UCERF version 3 ground motion reports for California as an independent consulting service.

The EZ-FRISK single site probabilistic and deterministic tool enables engineers and geoscientists to study seismic hazards in an easy and flexible manner. As with earlier releases, EZ-FRISK has modules for probabilistic and deterministic seismic hazard analysis (PSHA/DSHA) (with globally available regional seismic source models and a database of ground motion prediction models); spectral matching (adjusting an accelerogram to match a target response spectrum, while preserving realistic time-dependent characteristics of the ground motion); and site response (calculating the ground motion at the surface given a bedrock ground motion and the layers of soil and rock that overlay the bedrock at the site).

EZ-FRISK can quickly create design ground motions for engineering purposes that use earthquake modeling and statistical analysis to accurately reflect the desired level of safety, provide realistic time-dependent behavior, and consider site-specific soil and rock layering.

The model was developed using a regional grand inversion process. The outputs are in the form of participation rates, rather than individual faults with defined slip rate or segmentation models. Instead faults are assigned magnitude frequency distributions that include participation of adjoining faults based on over 200,000 rupture scenarios.

“Fugro continues to extend its legacy of developing state-of-the-art software for the industry. We listen to our clients, and our engineers and geoscientists work closely with them to ensure that we provide the necessary tools for performing seismic hazard analyses worldwide,” said Recep Yilmaz, president of Fugro Consultants.

March 9, 2015
Fugro Upgrades EZ-FRISK Seismic Hazard Analysis Software

Fugro has released an upgrade to its EZ-FRISK package — seismic hazard analysis software used by consultants and academics. The new upgrade includes the Next Generation West 2 ground motion prediction models, and improved user interface along with software fixes.

By early 2015, the software will incorporate the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) 2014 National Seismic Hazard Maps for the continental U.S., with the exception of California, and will include the Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast (UCERF) version 2. Fugro provides UCERF version 3 ground motion reports for California as an independent consulting service.

The EZ-FRISK single site probabilistic and deterministic tool enables engineers and geoscientists to study seismic hazards in an easy and flexible manner. As with earlier releases, EZ-FRISK has modules for probabilistic and deterministic seismic hazard analysis (PSHA/DSHA) (with globally available regional seismic source models and a database of ground motion prediction models); spectral matching (adjusting an accelerogram to match a target response spectrum, while preserving realistic time-dependent characteristics of the ground motion); and site response (calculating the ground motion at the surface given a bedrock ground motion and the layers of soil and rock that overlay the bedrock at the site).

EZ-FRISK can quickly create design ground motions for engineering purposes that use earthquake modeling and statistical analysis to accurately reflect the desired level of safety, provide realistic time-dependent behavior, and consider site-specific soil and rock layering.

The model was developed using a regional grand inversion process. The outputs are in the form of participation rates, rather than individual faults with defined slip rate or segmentation models. Instead faults are assigned magnitude frequency distributions that include participation of adjoining faults based on over 200,000 rupture scenarios.

“Fugro continues to extend its legacy of developing state-of-the-art software for the industry. We listen to our clients, and our engineers and geoscientists work closely with them to ensure that we provide the necessary tools for performing seismic hazard analyses worldwide,” said Recep Yilmaz, president of Fugro Consultants.

March 9, 2015
Fugro Launches G4 Correction Service for GNSS Augmentation

Fugro has launched the G4 service, designed to provide GNSS augmentation for offshore positioning applications. The new satellite correction service takes advantage of all four GNSS: GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou and Galileo.

By using all available GNSS satellites, Fugro’s G4 service is designed to improve availability and reliability of offshore positioning and thus enhance the safety and productivity of a wide range of survey and other activities offshore. G4 represents a significant advancement compared to augmentation systems which are based on GPS-only or GPS + GLONASS, the company said.

The BeiDou system operated by China currently provides coverage in the Asia-Pacific region. Fugro’s G4 service already utilises the first BeiDou satellites and is ready to start using the Galileo satellites as soon the EU announces Initial Operational Capability (IOC) status for this system. Galileo and future BeiDou satellites will be automatically included as they come online, steadily increasing availability and robustness of the integrated augmentation service.

The new G4 service will be particularly beneficial when the line-of-sight to certain satellites is obstructed by offshore structures – a key consideration during critical positioning operations. The G4 augmentation signals, transmitted via seven high–powered communication satellites to provide at least two independent broadcast channels anywhere in the world, will offer Fugro’s customers unrivalled coverage and availability.

February 17, 2015
Hexagon’s Acquisition of Veripos: Why Did This Go Down?

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?

NovAtel Correct.

NovAtel OEM628 triple-frequency + L-Band GNSS receiver.

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!

Now it all makes a lot of sense!

Tony Murfin
GNSS Aerospace

April 16, 2014
A Professional OEM View of the Munich Summit
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…

Tony Murfin
GNSS Aerospace
March 31, 2014
Real-time PPP with Galileo Demonstrated by Fugro

Fugro Seastar AS has been looking forward to demonstrating Real-Time Precise Point Positioning (PPP) based solely on Galileo signals since the last two satellites were launched October 12, the company said.

Those two satellites brought the constellation to a total of four satellites, the minimum required to permit calculation of a Galileo-only position. Fugro achieved this task on March 18, within a week of all four Galileo satellites being activated. Fugro is now generating Galileo orbit and clock corrections, which can be used in conjunction with the Fugro G2 decimeter-level corrections associated with its GPS/GLONASS PPP service.

The plot below shows performance of the Fugro orbit and clock service using GPS, GLONASS and Galileo satellites between 06:00 and 08:00 UTC, March 18, 2013, in Oslo, Norway. Between 07:00 and 07:30 UTC, only the four Galileo satellites were used for the solution, which achieved a similar accuracy to Fugro’s existing service, the company said.

“It is interesting that the noise level of the position is better with Galileo alone than when GPS and GLONASS satellites are also used,” Fugro said in a statement. “This is very encouraging as with only four satellites to choose from, the geometry of the Galileo-based solution is much weaker than the solutions before and after the Galileo-only period. This performance exceeds our expectations and suggests a strong future for Fugro’s Galileo PPP solution.”

March 26, 2013