Dr. Paul McBurney, oneNav Co-Founder and CTO
Q: What are the main challenges facing GNSS/GPS-based autonomous solutions in terms of signal integrity, jamming and spoofing, and how are these being addressed?
Dr McBurney: Outside of the military, interference is the most common threat to GNSS, with the dominant source being cellular transmission harmonics. It is commonly addressed with out-of-band filters. Non-terrestrial networks (NTN), like Global Star uplink at 1.6 GHz, are gaining traction in more mobile and wearable devices to fill gaps in cellular availability. However, it can create coexistence issues for devices for concurrent L1 GNSS reception during NTN uplink.
In military cases, while intentional interference is effective, the increasing number of GNSS bands to cover requires more transmission power. Modernized GNSS signals with wider bandwidth signals require more jamming power, which risks detection by radio frequency emission satellite system such as Hawkeye 360. The frequency of spoofing events will likely continue to increase and spill over into civilian domains.
Thanks to the increasing number of test ranges being made available to commercial GNSS developers, anti-spoofing technology is making some gains, at least in the high-end systems used for autonomous GNSS.
Q: What are the most impactful use cases and sectors benefiting from recent advancements in autonomous solutions?
Dr. McBurney: Ride sharing and transport are the likely winners in exploiting the costs savings of driverless systems with autonomous navigation. The past 15 years’ investments in the development of augmented navigation systems — mainly lidar and vision based — are finally paying off as we see Waymo in service, and soon Uber and Tesla in commercial deployments. Still, these systems depend solely on GNSS as the absolute positioning system, used for navigation in non-urban environments, but also fallback in certain cases where the sensors are problematic, as well as system calibration.
Agriculture, being one of the first segments to exploit autonomous solutions, can still see incremental gains as GNSS corrections systems move RTK from local to regional, allowing some monthly service margin improvements. High-precision consumer products like robotic lawn mowers will be enabled with similar infrastructure. Data services are a key part of infrastructure, for communication as well as precision navigation enablement. Companies such as Swift Navigation, Point One Navigation and Rx Networks are expanding their networks and competing with the likes of Trimble and Hexagon.
Read the Q&A in GPS World
About oneNav
Based in California, oneNav is developing L5-direct™ GNSS receiver technology for smartphones, wearables, drones, tracking devices, and more and has built a large L5-band patent portfolio. oneNav’s team comprises top GNSS experts from Qualcomm, Apple, Intel, SnapTrack, SiRF, Trimble and eRide. With extensive experience in GNSS system architecture, multipath mitigation, signal processing, ASIC design and AI/machine learning, oneNav engineers have designed and built billions of GNSS receivers on the market today and have collectively filed over 300 career GNSS patents.