Microchips for Precise Automotive Positioning Applications

Auto Tech Outlook | Thursday, January 07, 2021

FREMONT, CA: Swift Navigation is the leader in the emerging field of high-precision GNSS with the enormous potential to offer solutions that allow autonomous vehicles to navigate accurately and safely, paving the way for the next generation of self-driving vehicles. Today, robotics has hit the top of the tech revolution like a two-edged sword. Various veterans in the industry have touted robotics as a modern technology with considerable growth potential for its automation capabilities. Autonomous navigation technology takes advantage of the currently available laser security scanners for location instead of permitting dedicated infrastructure such as inductive wires, painted lines, magnets, or triangulation reflectors. Now, with the emulation of line tracks and tags, the new patent-pending ANT® location goes a step further. It offers a legitimate direct tactical change for inductive wires, painted lines, or magnetic tape for vehicle suppliers and represents an optimal retrofitting solution for extant installations, allowing the available premises to be used ideally.

Swift Navigation has been working with customers to support individual products up to large-scale projects since its founding in 2012. The company’s OEM partners, including general hardware and software support, new custom hardware advancement based on modular design, custom software and on-site testing and integration, are supported by NRE.

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Swift Navigation, a San Francisco- based technology company that designs centimeter-accurate GNSS technology and a cloud-based GNSS Corrections Service to drive a world of autonomous vehicles, experienced severe growth in 2018, developed multiple, innovative GNSS products, enhanced customers’ current product offerings and made company progress. Skylark, Swift’s high-precision cloud-based GNSS service, was built from the ground up for scale autonomy and allows high-precision placement for automotive and automotive mass market applications by providing affordable, quick, centimeter-level accuracy, and abolishing the complexity of deploying and maintaining GNSS networks. Swift Navigation currently rolls out its service in the U.S. and worldwide. Starling, a GNSS Positioning Engine, that not only powers Piksi Multi and Duro, but is receiver-agnostic and functions with third-party chips like STMicroelectronics and Broadcom. These are the microchips designed for precise automotive positioning applications and other autonomous vehicle, IoT, and robotics applications requiring small hardware and less power consumption. In addition, Swift Navigation improved its centimeter-accurate GNSS technology with several other firmware launches and regular updates from Piksi Multi. In 2018, the company announced four firmware updates to the Piksi Multi GNSS module–all for Swift Navigation customers at free of cost. This included the addendum of GLONASS and the support for Piksi Multi mostly from BeiDou, Galileo, and SBAS. The releases offered enhanced performance and additional features.

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