Permanent VRS Network and Positioning Engine for Mass-Market Scalable Precise Navigation

Abstract

During the last few decades, precise satellite navigation has been mainly based on PPP or RTK, depending on the application. More recently, the arrival of a set of technological trends, such as autonomous vehicles, location-based services, robotics and micro-mobility, has triggered the need of precise navigation for mass-market applications. The requirements of those applications in accuracy, affordability, fast time of convergence and massive number of simultaneous users do pose a big challenge to traditional precise satellite navigation solutions that were not conceived for mass market applications. Standard RTK solutions based on ad-hoc Virtual Reference Station (VRS) cannot scale to thousands of simultaneous users due to the bidirectional nature of the solution: the user needs to transmit its own position so that the VRS server can tailor a stream of corrections. On the other hand, PPP solutions typically has a long convergence time, which is not compliant mass-market needs. The work presented here proposes a new technology, leveraging the best of precise navigation techniques and Galileo differentiators, aiming at breaking those constraints in order to create a precise navigation solution tailored to the mass-market applications. The technology could be well suited for verticals that handle a large user-base such as Location-Based Services (e.g., smartphone) and automotive.