Precise navigation from the Arctic Circle to the Peloponnese

• Deutsche Telekom has expanded its Precise Positioning offering to Eastern Europe 
• Even more precise: robot mowers navigate safely without perimeter wire 
• True autonomous mobility through precise positioning 

Deutsche Telekom is expanding its Precise Positioning service for business customers to Eastern Europe in cooperation with Swift Navigation. Precise Positioning is based on Swift Navigation's Skylark correction service and improves the accuracy of navigation systems by up to 100 times. This is essential for applications such as autonomous driving of cars and tractors. But the robot mower in the home garden can also find its way safely, even without a boundary wire. 

Navigating in the centimeter range 

Positioning via satellites is now widespread worldwide, with more than 6 billion devices using systems such as the American GPS and the European Galileo system for positioning and route planning every day. To compensate for inaccuracies in the positioning of satellite navigation systems such as Galileo or GPS, Deutsche Telekom operates a network of antenna sites in Germany and large parts of Europe. With the help of the data measured at these locations, the position can be corrected to an accuracy of a few centimeters. This makes it possible, for example, to use robotic lawnmowers without a boundary wire. 

From the Arctic Circle to the Peloponnese 

In recent years, such sites have been set up in large parts of northern, central, southern and western Europe. This network has now been extended to other countries in eastern Europe. At the same time, the accuracy of the service has been significantly increased to a maximum deviation of 2 cm in open skies. The countries include Croatia, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and Slovakia. The most south-easterly station is now located on Rhodes, the most westerly on the Azores and the most northerly near Hammerfest in the north of Norway. 

Accuracy increased again: new applications become possible 

Today's satellite-based navigation systems such as GPS generally achieve an accuracy of several meters. This means that satellite-based positioning is too imprecise for cars, machines, robots or parcel drones to navigate autonomously and safely. 

Inaccuracies are caused by turbulence in the atmosphere, deviations in the orbit of the satellites or reflections of the GNSS signal from buildings and window surfaces. The Skylark positioning solution from Swift provides correction information on a second-by-second basis, allowing a navigation system in a vehicle or a robotic lawnmower to compensate for these positioning errors. To do this, an evenly distributed network of special antennas collects data from the most important global navigation satellites and compares it with the precisely measured antenna location. High-precision correction data is calculated on the basis of the information collected in this way and sent in real time via mobile communications to cars, for example. In Europe, Deutsche Telekom and Deutsche Funkturm operate a network of these special antennas, known as reference stations - with uniform and fail-safe coverage. 

Among other things, this is needed for 

• Autonomous driving of cars, but also, for example, robotic mowers without boundary wires. 
• The use of autonomous drones in logistics 
• The surveying of construction sites. 
• Vehicle-to-vehicle communication, i.e. the permanent exchange of information between vehicles (V2X)