Autonomous vehicles, machines, drone and other automated systems rely on sensors to accurately locate themselves in their environments. While today’s autonomous systems primarily rely on absolute position data for navigation, future applications will also use it to share sensor data with other systems and the infrastructure. Moreover, accurate absolute positioning will play a growing role in evaluating and testing autonomous systems as well as in collecting training data for the development of AI and machine learning algorithms.

Autonomous systems will likely be essential for the development of flexible, scalable airports with optimized and seamless flows of passengers, goods and data, as well as highly secured and robust facilities to ensure safe traveling. Enabling them will require precise and reliable positioning and continuous connectivity through digital infrastructure—the focus topics of the DINPAS project.

Global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) offer a key technology for absolute positioning, meeting industry requirements in terms of cost, accuracy and availability. They do so by leveraging correction information from a GNSS reference network, which can be efficiently distributed to support wide-ranging use cases and large numbers of devices globally using an open and interoperable data format and efficient mobile network operator distribution defined by the cellular standards organization 3GPP. 

Funded by the Vinnova program, “Advanced and Innovative Digital Infrastructure,” Digital Infrastructure enabling accurate Positioning for Autonomous Systems (DINPAS) aims to evaluate the requirements of future autonomous airports in terms of reliable, precise positioning as well as scalability to large numbers of devices, to benefit the next generation of industrial digital solutions. The targeted implementation, including software for generating corrections, 3GPP-based delivery and navigation device, will be used for evaluating relevant performance.

The total budget of the project, which runs from October 1, 2021, until September 30, 2023, is 15.4 MSEK. The DINPAS consortium is an industry-wide cooperation between research institutes, the telecom-industry, telecom operator as well as small and medium-sized companies and consists of RISE, AstaZero, Combitech, Ericsson, IBG, Katla Aero, Lantmäteriet, Telia and u-blox.