The technology multinational GMV has recently reached the milestone of incorporating its safe, high precision, and reliable positioning technology onboard vehicles of the German premium car manufacturer BMW Group.
GMV’s positioning solution comprises two components: an onboard Positioning Engine software (PE) and a GNSS Correction Service (CS). The CS provides BMW Group vehicles with corrections to the Broadcast Ephemeris for different GNSS constellations, augmentation data to remove local atmospheric effects and safety-related information for computing a reliable user position. The PE integrated in the vehicles’ on-board unit also uses the corrections, together with GNSS signals and information from other sensors, to compute a trustable vehicle position, speed, and heading.
Both CS and PE have been developed, validated, and evolved over the last years in order to be able to cope with the requirements laid down by the different GNSS-based high accuracy positioning markets including the automotive market. The latter has been the latest challenge taken on by GMV within its positioning solution, for which ISO 26262 (among others), the strictest automotive standards, plus the highly demanding quality practices for critical software were adopted.
In addition to the software side, GMV’s solution relies on a secure and redundant physical infrastructure. GMV owns and operates a Worldwide GNSS Station Network, which provides the GNSS raw data needed by the CS to generate the corrections. Such corrections are computed within two physically independent Data Centers, giving GMV’s solution the necessary availability levels for automated driving applications.
This production launch milestone adds automated driving functions to GMV’s positioning solution market portfolio, consolidating GMV as one of the main worldwide suppliers of GNSS based high accuracy positioning solutions.
A wealth of experience and proven expertise
GMV has more than 30 years’ experience in the GNSS domain and has been targeting safe and accurate positioning systems for more than 20 years. The company has also more than 18 years’ experience in the supply of software for the automotive sector, working with both automotive OEMs and Tier-1 suppliers.
As part of the magicGNSS suite, GMV GSharp for Automotive provides high-accuracy, safe and reliable positioning information (position, velocity, and heading), which is later combined with automated driving functions. The safe positioning solution is based on satellite navigation (GNSS) technologies, hybridized with other sensors in the vehicle, such as Inertial Measurement Units, Wheel Speed sensors or Odometers. GMV has developed a Positioning Engine software, which works embedded in the vehicle, and supplies the Correction Service, which is a server-based element broadcasting augmentation data to the Positioning Engine through the Internet.
Both Correction Service and Positioning Engine are developed following the ISO 26262 and ISO 21448 standards to ensure compliance with safety requirements. The solution also complies with the concept of security-from-design as per ISO 21434, including the necessary counter-measures in the SW and system and in the GNSS related attack detection (anti-spoofing and anti-jamming schemes). The most demanding automotive project management practices and the strict industry standards for software engineering (A-SPICE CL3) have been applied during its development.
