Home Driverless Cars Continent-spanning Drive Test Demonstrates Lane-Level Positioning

Continent-spanning Drive Test Demonstrates Lane-Level Positioning

by IAV Staff

Swift ​​Navigation​ has completed a 6,600-mile cross-country drive test measuring the efficacy of its Skylark cloud corrections service and demonstrating nationwide lane-level GNSS correction coverage at the accuracy, reliability and availability levels required by its customers.

swift-skylark-cross-country-drive-test
Swift cross-country drive route map. Courtesy Sswift Navigation.

The drive across 26 states began on November 29, 2019 and ended December 19, 2019, logging 116 hours and 14 minutes with 12 drivers taking turns behind the wheel. The vehicle was equipped with 20 different GNSS devices, using five unique chipsets that included Swift’s Piksi Multi, Duro and multiple leading GNSS silicon providers. Several were dual-frequency, at least one was single-frequency. Data from two different antennas are presented in the downloadable dataset:  a high-end, survey-grade antenna and a more price-conscious automotive-grade antenna representative of a typical production solution.

The results confirmed that Swift’s precise positioning solution, composed of Skylark and the Starling positioning engine, delivers consistent lane-level accuracy at continental level. Skylark delivered 100% availability, with sub-decimeter accuracy, over the entire United States, wherever cellular coverage was available.

Performance highlights based on the results from the drive:

• +Sub-meter horizontal accuracy (2-sigma) achieved across all environments
• 100% Skylark availability
• Highly repeatable results with Starling + Skylark across variety of dual-frequency GNSS chipsets

“This is the longest continuous GNSS-based precise positioning drive test of its kind and we are proud of the engineering team at Swift for undertaking this ambitious task,” said Anthony Cole, executive vice president of engineering. “The results demonstrate that Skylark is truly a cross-continental corrections network delivering the high integrity and high availability required by automotive OEMs, last-mile applications, rail, mobile and micromobility companies.”

The Skylark corrections service is also now available in Europe and is currently being built out to support autonomous applications across the globe.

A complete write-up and representative datasets of the cross-country drive test is available at www.swiftnav.com.

Swift Navigation vehicle, courtesy Swift
Test drive vehicle, courtesy Swift Navigation.

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