Project Road Runner: A Demonstration of Swift Navigation’s Precise Positioning Solution Across the Continental U.S.

In the past few years, autonomous navigation has emerged and most car manufacturers now have programs involving some level of autonomy. GNSS is seen as a vital sensor due to its low price point and its ability to provide absolute positioning. Using GNSS for mass-market vehicle autonomous navigation raises several challenges including: - The accuracy required is typically at decimeter level (lane level accuracy) - The time to meet high-accuracy requirements is in seconds, not minutes - The expected service coverage area is typically at a continental scale - The price point of the hardware (GNSS receiver/antenna, IMU,.. ) required for the positioning solution should typically be significantly below 100 dollars - The positioning engine should provide a measure of the trustworthiness of position estimates and should be developed according to automotive safety standards Swift Navigation has developed a unique solution that meets these requirements. The solution is centered around Skylark, Swift Navigation's GNSS correction service, and Starling, Swift Navigation's positioning engine.. Skylark is a state-of-the-art continental-scale correction service that was developed to address the demanding requirements of the automotive use case. It is a high accuracy, highly available wide-area correction service that enables state of the art accuracy and convergence performance on a global scale. In particular, Skylark can enable sub-decimeter accuracy in seconds of convergence time anywhere in CONUS and Europe (and growing). This is a significant improvement compared to RTK (fast convergence time but regional coverage) or PPP (global coverage but log convergence time) techniques. Also, Skylark enables SSR correction broadcast for bandwidth-efficient, one-way communication broadcast as well as RTCM OSR legacy correction delivery. Starling positioning engine is an ASIL compliant, receiver agnostic positioning engine that gives industry-leading integrity and positioning performance. Placed on top of a mass-market GNSS receiver and IMU, it can provide sub-decimeter level accuracy anywhere in the Skylark regions of coverage. Starling positioning engine is based on advanced sensor fusion algorithms fusing GNSS position, IMU and wheel odometry measurement to maintain lane level accuracy in most driving conditions. In this paper, an analysis of the Swift Navigation positioning solution is performed with different sets of representative automotive hardware across a whole continental US drive totaling 7000 miles (11200km) and hundreds of hours of driving. In this representative and unprecedented data set of US roads, performance metrics are computed for different environments showing the high performance of Swift Navigation’s solution.