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6 Mission-critical info for UST professionals Platform one Fixposition has developed a positioning system that fuses data from a number of sensors and GNSS satellites for highly accurate positioning (writes Nick Flaherty). The Vision-RTK 2 fuses data from GNSS satellites with a camera, IMU and odometry from the wheels to maintain an accuracy to within a few centimeters after a 100 m GNSS outage. The sensor fusion algorithm is not time- dependent, so it can work with delivery vehicles that need to stop and start regularly in places where satellite signals do not reach, such as built-up areas, under a roof or even in underground parking garages. In measurements full satellite outages typically lasted for less than 100m while degraded signals could often last between 160 to 300 m and in these environments, Fixposition’s Vision- RTK 2 was able to maintain accuracy below 50cm, while even high-end RTK- their various sensors to estimate how the vehicle is moving. This is giving you positioning and orientation data that can be combined with a navigation software stack and object detection for accurate control of a vehicle in an underground parking garage, for example. The system has been tested on a variety of vehicles including, small and large robots, cars, tractors, lawn mowers, and more driving thousands of kilometers to cover a wide range of environments, such as travelling down narrow old city street alleyways, through forest canopies, as well as multi-story parking garages. In a random sample of data analyzed covering a wide variety of challenging environments with a distance of 80 km covered, 30 km of which was without GNSS satellite coverage and the average outage lasting 120m, the errors for the Vision-RTK 2 typically stayed below 0.8% of distance travelled, compared with over 5% for other systems. Positioning Beyond RTK positioning February/March 2022 | Unmanned Systems Technology INS solutions cannot consistently keep meter level accuracy. “What we do goes beyond typical RTK-INS solutions; it’s an advanced form of dead reckoning,” said Peter Mardaleichvili, Product Manager at Fixposition. “RTK on its own is not enough in environments dominated by multi-path reflections or for autonomous agriculture applications such as under tree canopies, in greenhouses, through barns, close to forest tree lines and more.”   A rugged version is designed with an IP66/7 housing to work outdoors with high-reliability M8 connectors that would be mounted externally, for example high up on a tractor. The company also plans to make it available as an OEM board. It can also take an input from external accessories such as wheelspeed or high- end IMU sensors. The algorithm runs on a powerful SoM microcontroller, fusing data from High-accuracy global positioning in all environments using deep sensor fusion