The GPS World Buyers Guide is the only comprehensive, continuously updated directory of leading providers across several industry segments. Watch for the latest version in the May/June issue.
Adding your listing has never been easier, with over 40 businesses already listed and available for contact.
Why should you be in our Buyer’s Guide?
Basic Listings are free
Year-round online visibility
Comprehensive and continuously updated
Deemed “a must-read, keeper issue” with our more than 30,000 loyal monthly magazine readers — verified annually by a third-party auditing firm as GNSS/PNT buyers, integrators, and specifiers
Questions about the online or print Buyers Guide? Contact Petra Turko via email, [email protected]
The UK Hydrographic Office (UKHO) hosted the UK’s first cross-government geodesy, positioning, navigation and timing working group in October. Representatives from 19 government bodies shared insight on the risks, opportunities and interdependencies linked to PNT systems, including GNSS.
On Nov. 19, the UK announced a £155M investment in PNT. The working group will continue to support collaboration and exchange knowledge as further resilience actions progress, according to the UKHO.
GNSS supports critical activities across the UK economy. It provides accurate location and timing for communications, maritime and aviation safety, and the smooth running of power and financial networks. As threats to space-based systems grow, improving national resilience is increasingly important.
“The UKHO’s expertise in geodesy plays a key role in helping the UK understand and protect PNT services. Our specialists provide trusted positioning and timing advice across defense and civil programs, including supporting the safety of navigation in UK waters,” the agency said.
“It is fantastic to hear that the work with eLoran, GNSS Interference Monitoring Programme, Space Based Time Transfer and the National Timing Centre have received ongoing funding,” said Joe Pearce, senior geodesy and PNT specialist, UKHO. “This funding will assist both our data collection and the mariner. It will protect and assist future geodesy and PNT, improving resilience as these systems come increasingly under threat.”
Aero Drop Systems (ADS) has developed Pathfinder, a proprietary autonomous navigation framework designed to reduce dependence on GNSS-based positioning. Pathfinder is signal-resilient, capable of maintaining precision even in complete GNSS dead zones and unaffected by deceptive interference.
At the core of Pathfinder lies an array of sensors and advanced self-regulating logic driven by machine learning. Unlike traditional systems that treat GPS as a singular source of truth, Pathfinder fuses a constant stream of information from multiple internal and external domains and dynamically rebalances itself in real time as it evaluates, cross-verifies, and refines its positional understanding based on an algorithm that classifies the trustworthiness of each data stream.
The result is a self-correcting navigation intelligence that can anticipate changing conditions, isolate false data, and continue to perform when other systems cannot. This allows Pathfinder to sustain highly accurate navigation during satellite connection or radio frequency outages or when being targeted with jamming or spoofing.
Designed as a modular framework, Pathfinder can be integrated across a range of fully autonomous platforms operating on land, at sea, or in the air. Its flexible architecture makes it suitable for both commercial logistics and defense applications, where navigation integrity is critical to mission success.
Currently in the testing phase, Pathfinder is part of ADS’s broader initiative to develop resilient, autonomous logistics technologies capable of performing in contested and complex environments. ADS has confirmed that Pathfinder will serve as the core navigation technology for the platform Aerocrate. Aerocrate is a disposable, autonomous aerial delivery system that enables precise, reliable resupply without requiring recovery operations, staging areas, or active communication with the platform.
The annual European Navigation Conference (ENC23), set for May 31-June 2, will be hosted by the European Space Agency (ESA) at its ESTEC facilities in Noordwijk, The Netherlands. Abstracts are due no later than Jan. 24, and notification of acceptance or rejection will be sent out by the end of February.
This year’s conference will focus on resilient navigation. Organized by The Netherlands Institute for Navigation (NIN), the conference will address resilience in the broadest sense, including navigation sub-functions, operational routines, standards and policies.
The ENC23 tech committee has broken down the overarching theme into a range of topics, including integral end-to-end navigation solutions, specifics in position, navigation and timing (PNT), routing, data integrity questions and more.
Early-bird registration is open now and ends March 15. General registration begins thereafter and the deadline to register is May 21. For more information about registration and abstract submission, visit the ENC23’s website.
The 2023 European Navigation Conference (ENC) will take place May 31-June 2 with a focus on resilient navigation. This conference, which will welcome professionals from the positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) field, is organized by the Netherlands Institute of Navigation, a member of the European Group of Institutes of Navigation (EUGIN).
Given the growing vulnerability of satellite-based position and timing, the conference will focus on resiliency, which requires redundancy in the signal domain, terrestrial and space infrastructures, and on-board implementation — as well as addressing vulnerabilities in navigation functions, data, and guidance control.
Thanks to the hospitality of the European Space Agency, the ENC will be held at the ESTEC site in Noordwijk, The Netherlands, where the Galileo satellite system is designed and where navigation satellites are tested before launching.
The Ministerial Council of the member states of the European Space Agency (ESA) has pledged 351 million euros to ESA’s board of directors for navigation to aid in multiple satellite navigation endeavors.
This funding helps support ESA’s FutureNAV program, the Navigation Innovation and Support Program (NAVISP), and the Moonlight Initiative, developed for lunar telecommunications and navigation coverage and innovation.
The FutureNAV program is aimed at addressing the rapidly growing need for more ubiquitous, resilient and reliable positioning, navigation and timing (PNT). Its first mission consists of an initial in-orbit demonstration, small constellation of low-Earth-orbit (LEO) navigation satellites. The LEO-PNT satellites will test a multi-layer approach to deliver more accurate and robust PNT services, supplementing Galileo.
The second FutureNAV mission, GENESIS, will map the moving contours of Earth, while enhancing the accuracy of Galileo.
The expanded funding will also be invested in NAVISP. The program has already began working on over 200 projects relating to satellite navigation, PNT research, and backing Member States in research priorities.
Lastly, funding is being delegated to the Moonlight Initiative, a project designed by ESA to extend satellite navigation and telecommunications coverage to the Moon. The advancement and launch of Moonlight infrastructure on the Moon will undertake several missions bolstering future Moon exploration.
Achieving PNT resilience for critical infrastructure applications
GNSS are magic. They are. One dictionary defines magic as “a power that allows people (such as witches and wizards) to do impossible things by saying special words or performing special actions.” By this definition, we have all become witches and wizards, doing what previous generations would have deemed impossible.
This magic, however, can be affected by external forces that render it useless at best and, at worst, dangerous. Warnings about GNSS positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) service vulnerabilities have been raised for 25+ years. Numerous organizations have warned of the potential safety, security and economic impacts of GNSS interference. Still, like modern-day Cassandras, their warnings have been ignored, and sole use of PNT services that rely on space-based signals continues to expand.
“Magic services” are addictive and cannot be ignored. Yet, it is well past the time to merely admire the problem of GNSS interference — benefitting from magical GNSS services while ignoring existing and emerging threats and challenges. It is time to draw a line and implement resilient, complementary PNT solutions to support all critical infrastructure sectors and applications in the event of any GNSS disruption, due to jamming or spoofing or systemic causes. “Magic” is magical when it works. When it does not, first and foremost, it should “do no harm.”
Threats, Challenges and Needs
Presidential Policy Directive (PPD) 21, Critical Infrastructure Security and Resilience,issued in 2013, defines resilience as “the ability to prepare for and adapt to changing conditions and withstand and recover rapidly from disruptions.” It also notes that “resilience includes the ability to withstand and recover from deliberate attacks, accidents, or naturally occurring threats or incidents.”
In 2016, the UK Department of International Development noted that “Resilience covers both ‘physical and societal systems” through four “R” principles: robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness and rapidity (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Infrastructure resilience properties. (Image: UK Department of International Development)
More recently, Andy Proctor (RethinkPNT) pointed out that “A resilient PNT system protects its critical capabilities (assets) from harm by using protective resilience techniques to passively resist or actively detect threats, respond to them, and recover from the harm they cause.”
Policies, processes, financial arrangements and incentives are also crucial to achieving resilience — and that has been, and remains, the problem. Lacking the emergence of strong leadership from our institutions, the ability to achieve actual resilience will continue to falter and admiration of the problem will continue.
Developing a resilient PNT system is always a balance of technical complexity and non-technical aspects, for example, costs. The key consideration for users must be the required performance metrics they need for their use-case(s) to ensure their resilience — including accuracy, availability, integrity, continuity and coverage. The one least understood and many times omitted is integrity — the level of trust a user/use-case needs to safely and securely use the PNT services. The ability to trust PNT services must always be a consideration for critical infrastructure applications.
Unfortunately, many users of critical infrastructure PNT do not know some of the PNT metrics they need to ensure safety and security. More troubling, there is no guidance as to what constitutes “significant economic impact” (see PPD 21) or acceptable economic loss — and over what period or range of use cases. This understanding will require analysis of their design, development and operational experiences, and working with PNT systems engineers to first derive these metrics and then drive the continuous improvements (see Figure 2) needed to achieve and retain truly complementary PNT capabilities. Without clear metrics and guidance, one cannot claim that any solution will meet any “required level of resilience.”
Figure 2. Resilient PNT lifecycle.
Supporting PNT Users
As with all systems engineering (SE) activities, PNT system resilience begins with identifying and documenting user needs based on their specific user stories/use cases. Figure 3 depicts different aspects of resilience that can be sought, depending on the unique use-case “demands.”
Figure 3. Resilience aspects. (Photo: UK Space Agency)
While the resilience needs of different use cases will differ, for any specific use case, a given “PNT solution” will either achieve the required/threshold level of resilience (based on the operational environment) or it will not. Some use cases may also require fail-safe or fail-soft capability and the ability to recover to known, trusted and usable states. Shouldn’t many, if not all critical sector use cases require this?
Equally important is the identification of risks and threats, as they are critical to understanding the challenges that the system must face while continuing to provide the necessary P, N and/or T service performance. It is also key to understand and document the system architecture and environment in which it must perform. With knowledge of a user’s needs, the threats, hazards and challenges they face, and the system architecture, the SE process can develop an understanding of the “gaps” that exist and of the levels of risk they impose on a critical infrastructure system’s functional, physical and operational performance. Understanding this, essential use-appropriate mitigations can be identified, or if need be, developed, and a resilient, solution-agnostic PNT requirement document created.
The Way Forward
The Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute (CIRI), a U.S. Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence, notes that “critical infrastructure systems are facing a myriad of challenges. Solutions must address the cyber, physical and human dimensions.” They keyed into four areas where critical infrastructure resilience activities should be directed: building the business case, information policy and regulation, developing new tools and technologies, fostering and educating the workforce.
These include the recognition that “policy and regulation have a powerful impact on market forces.” While the fact that “most U.S. infrastructure is owned and operated by the private sector” is a challenge, it should not be an excuse.
We must start immediately to re-establish strong SE practices, policies, and principles to help critical users understand their needs and determine the metrics required to ensure safety and “preclude significant economic impact.” Only then can we understand from a national perspective, the needed safety and security metrics and what constitutes significant economic impact, and then establish categories of solution-agnostic requirements. Lacking these clear resilience targets, detailed planning, and required resource commitments, the growing threats of PNT vulnerability will continue only to be admired, rather than be mitigated. Hope is not a strategy, but this systems engineer hopes that it does not take a truly catastrophic event to finally prompt much needed and long overdue actions.
Mitch Narins is the principal consultant/owner of Strategic Synergies LLC, a consultancy he formed following more than 40 years of U.S. government service. He is a Fellow of the Royal Institute of Navigation, a aenior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, a member of the Institute of Navigation and head of its Washington, D.C., section, and a member of RTCA, RTCM, IEEE and SAE Standards Committees.
Registration is now open for the jointly sponsored Position Location and Navigation Symposium (PLANS) taking place April 24-27. PLANS is a biennial technical conference that occurs in the spring of odd-numbered years to provide an international forum to share the latest advances in navigation technology. The conference is sponsored by the IEEE’s Aerospace and Electronics Systems Society (AESS) and the Institute of Navigation (ION).
The PLANS conference takes place over four days, with the first day for hosting tutorials and three days dedicated to technical sessions.
The tutorials aim to provide attendees with the opportunity to learn about navigation technology from industry experts. A variety of tutorials are offered to serve the needs of both newcomers and those well versed in the field of navigation. This year’s tutorials will include a range of navigation subjects from core navigation fundamentals to in-depth classes about the latest technologies.
Technical sessions are offered over a three-day period, with four sessions running simultaneously each morning and afternoon. At the technical sessions scientists, researchers, and engineers from around the world present their latest work in the field of PNT. Technical session topics will include inertial sensing and technology; GNSS; integrated, collaborative and opportunistic navigation; and applications to automated, semi-autonomous and fully-autonomous systems.
To view the PLANS 2023 technical program and register for the event, visit ion.org/plans.
The D70 is the latest release in the Boreas digital FOG (DFOG) series, offering a new performance grade with superior accuracy, exceptional stability and reliability. The technology is suited to surveying, mapping and navigation across subsea, marine, land and air applications.
“We are thrilled to expand the Boreas series with the D70. It’s a system that will provide additional flexibility in the Boreas family, making ultra-high accuracy inertial navigation far more affordable than with previous FOG INS systems,” said Xavier Orr, CEO and co-founder of Advanced Navigation. “This patented technology opens the possibility for adopting FOG INS systems across a much broader range of vehicular applications, particularly autonomous vehicles and aircraft where weight and size are at a premium.”
Boreas D70 combines closed-loop DFOG and accelerometer technologies with a dual-antenna real-time kinematic (RTK) GNSS receiver. These are coupled with Advanced Navigation’s artificial-intelligence-based fusion algorithm to deliver accurate and precise navigation.
The system features ultra-fast gyrocompassing, acquiring and maintaining an accurate heading under demanding conditions. While the D70 does contain a GNSS receiver, it is not required for gyrocompass operation.
Based on the company’s DFOG technology, the D70 delivers a 40% reduction in size, weight, power and cost (SWaP-C) when compared to systems of similar performance.
0.01° roll and pitch
0.1° secant latitude heading (gyrocompass)
0.01°/hour bias instability
10 mm position accuracy
The Boreas Series
The Boreas DFOG series features ultra-fast gyrocompassing and can acquire heading, either stationary or dynamically, in less than two minutes. The gyrocompassing allows the system to determine a highly accurate heading without any reliance on magnetic heading or GNSS.
The technology stems from Advanced Navigation’s artificial intelligence sensor-fusion algorithm allowing the system to extract significantly more information from the data. It is designed for control applications, with a high level of health monitoring and instability prevention to ensure stable and reliable data.
Advanced Navigation designed Boreas from the ground up for reliability and availability. The hardware and software are designed and tested to international safety standards and have been environmentally tested to MIL-STD-810. The system achieves a mean time between failure (MTBF) of more than 70,000 hours.
Additional features of the Boreas D70 include Ethernet, CAN and NMEA protocols, as well as disciplined timing via a PTP server and 1 PPS. An embedded web interface provides full access to all of the device’s internal functions and data. Internal storage allows for up to 1 year of data logging.
About DFOG Technology
DFOG is patented technology, which has been developed over 25 years involving two research institutions. DFOG was created to meet the demand for smaller and more cost-effective FOGs, while increasing reliability and accuracy.
The first generation of FOG, made available in 1976, used analog signals and analog-signal processing. The second generation was developed in 1994 and is still used to this day. It improved upon the first generation with a hybrid approach using an analog signal in the coil with digital signal processing.
In 2021, FOG evolved into DFOG. This third generation of FOG sets itself apart by being completely digital, providing higher performance and reliability while enabling a 40% reduction in SWaP-C.
To achieve this, three different yet complementary technologies have been developed to improve the capabilities of FOG.
Digital Modulation Techniques. DFOG uses a specially developed digital modulation technique passing spread spectrum signals through the coil. The new digital modulation technique introduced in DFOG technology allows in-run variable errors in the coil to be measured and removed from the measurements. This makes DFOG significantly more stable and reliable than traditional FOGs. It also allows a smaller FOG with less coil length to achieve the accuracy of one with a longer coil.
Revolutionary Optical Chip. By integrating five sensitive components into a single chip and removing all the fiber splices, the size, weight and power are reduced considerably while significantly improving reliability and performance.
Specially Designed Optical Coil. DFOG employs a specially designed closed-loop optical coil, developed to take full advantage of the digital modulation techniques. The design allows for optimum sensing of in-run variable coil errors using the new digital modulation technique. It also provides a very high level of protection for the optical components from shock and vibration.
In a world where GPS and other GNSS signals can be easily denied or, worse, spoofed, interest in other forms of navigation has rebounded.
Imagine being able to locate yourself within a couple of centimeters with just your cellphone – deep underground. Or inside a metal structure. Or underwater (assuming you can keep your equipment dry).
No satellite signals, no Wi-Fi ranging, no inertial system. Just the ambient magnetic flux that constantly surrounds us all. Everywhere.
Animals have used the Earth’s magnetic field to find their way for millions of years. People have been using magnetic compasses for over a thousand. Until the advent of GPS, magnetic compasses were foundational tools for aircraft and ship navigation, especially when out of sight of easily recognized landmarks.
Then GPS came along, and almost everyone’s eyes turned to space.
But in a world where GPS and other GNSS signals can be easily denied or, worse, spoofed, interest in other forms of navigation has rebounded. And because GPS helped demonstrate the efficiencies geospatial services provide, users also want those services to be more resilient and to work in places signals from space just can’t reach.
According to Neill, “Our solution builds upon inexpensive magnetometers, smartphones, machine learning, edge computing, and some incredibly complex math to convert raw magnetic data into a source of ultra-precise location data. These relatively recent tech developments allow us to bring things together for a major update to a centuries-old way of navigation and positioning.”
Describing AstraNav as a software tech company, Neill said that the company’s system is “hardware agnostic.” It can work on “just about anything that has a magnetometer. No additional hardware or external connectivity is required, and we can run on any existing operating system.”
The company has partners in retail, automotive and telecom validating the technology. They have also been working with a U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) combatant commander to demonstrate the product, as well as Virginia Tech and its National Security Institute (VTNSI.) “This is not a case of ‘here’s an idea that we hope will materialize,” said Neill. Describing two real-world trials and use cases to the board, he said, “This technology is a reality, and we’re doing it.”
Most previous magnetic navigation efforts relied upon relatively low-resolution maps. An airplane could find its way safely across the ocean using the maps that were available and likely end up within a mile or two of an airport. Much higher resolution maps built through surveys and artificial intelligence are critical to AstraNav’s centimeter-level accuracy with systems that continue to learn on their own.
Intellectual property is AstraNav’s biggest asset. “We have multiple patents filed and pending,” said Neill. “Our IP is what allows us to sense and analyze magnetic fields so finely, develop maps, and make use of very low-cost magnetometers, such as the ones in cell phones.”
Several people at the advisory board presentation expressed surprise that they had not heard of the company and this capability before. “We have been busy getting established as a company, supporting our first commercial clients, and doing demonstrations for various folks within DOD,” Neill explained. “This presentation is by way of our coming out party. We are very eager to become better known and are looking forward to explaining our capabilities one-on-one with potential users.”
Citing an abundance of proprietary material, Neill was unwilling to discuss a lot of technical detail at the public meeting. His short presentation, he said, was to raise awareness and stimulate interest.
The number of those in attendance who after the presentation said they were eager to learn more showed that he was successful.
Dana A. Goward is President of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation
The open access portal for NAVIGATION: Journal of the Institute of Navigation is now live at live at navi.ion.org.
“ION has partnered with HighWire Press to host its new open access portal for NAVIGATION giving readers a sophisticated platform that offers superior search tools, advanced research capabilities, new citation tools and article alerts,” said Lisa Beaty, ION’s executive director.
“NAVIGATION’s open access portal will allow for the rapid dissemination of cutting-edge, high-impact research across the breadth of the field of positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) as well as all related areas intersecting with PNT,” Beaty added.
PNT researchers, academicians and industry members can now access free and open research through NAVIGATION’s new portal. The portal makes it easier to:
download NAVIGATION open access papers for reading, sharing and citating
Swift Navigation designs, manufactures and integrates GNSS receivers, as well as providing the Skylark wide-area GNSS corrections service. Its markets are automotive, transportation (last mile delivery, commercial trucking, rail), robotics/machine control (construction, mining, precision agriculture, landscaping), UAVs, micromobility and mobile devices and applications.
The company’s technology is compatible and interoperable with most major GNSS receivers for multiple markets. Its Starling positioning engine and Skylark corrections “are scalable to bring precision to legacy low-cost single-frequency receivers, all the way to the most sophisticated state-of-the-art triple-frequency multi-constellation systems,” said Joel Gibson, Swift’s executive vice president of Automotive. “By working with a multitude of receiver vendors for different applications, Swift leverages all constellations and all signals and maximizes the performance required for the application.”
The most accurate and reliable navigation system for every application would take advantage of all available GNSS signals, as well as all available corrections, dead reckoning and fused data from other sensors, such as cameras, lidar and radar. However, of course, that is not possible due to cost, size, weight and power considerations. Swift’s approach to the trade-offs required depends on each use case.
Micromobility
In the area of micromobility (such as scooters), the main constraints for implementing a positioning solution are cost and power, coupled with the challenge of satellite signal outages and multipath in dense urban environments where these vehicles primarily operate, Gibson explained. “Cost-effective dual-frequency GNSS receivers are now showing up in micromobility architectures. Pairing them with our Starling positioning engine, which integrates inertial sensor data and wheel ticks, and augmenting them with Skylark corrections data, makes it possible to meet such compliance requirements as geofencing and limiting sidewalk use.”
Additionally, by achieving decimeter-level positioning, Swift’s micromobility solution makes it easier for both users and service staff to find scooters, which increases the scooter companies’ revenues.
Photo: Swift Navigation
Automotive
In the automotive industry, inertial sensors and wheel odometry are ubiquitous and pair naturally with GNSS to mitigate satellite signal outages, Gibson pointed out. Likewise, cameras and radar — cornerstones of ADAS — are very complementary to GNSS for safety applications, and lidar further complements GNSS in feature-rich environments such as dense urban areas.
Rail
Rail applications, such as Positive Train Control, have traditionally needed an accuracy of one or two meters, coupled with ruggedized hardware. “Swift’s precise positioning solution is deployed across continental rail systems today, and we are now engaging rail OEM and operator programs requiring sub-meter accuracy to ensure track-to-track accuracy and safety requirements in support of the transition to more autonomous rail operations,” said Gibson. “Leading rail companies are also looking for operational efficiencies by transitioning away from the high operational costs of maintaining reference base stations along track routes, instead moving to the more cost effective, reliable and seamless Skylark corrections coverage.”
