A leader in location and navigation data and services adds real-time high-precision positioning.
It was a logical progression, adding the element of high-precision positioning to location data and services. For many downstream users of their data, the Netherlands-based firm HERE Technologies (HERE) is one they may use daily but maybe have never heard of. Already nearly ubiquitous in markets for location and navigation data and services, this expansion by HERE is a harbinger of things to come as the world becomes more and more geospatially wired.
Announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January of 2020 (CES 2020), HERE’s positioning service is expanding in the realms of autonomy, consumer navigation, AR, and game development. High Definition GNSS Positioning — HD GNSS — is HERE’s foundation for highly desirable synergies between geospatial data in the form of high-definition maps and real-time precise positioning.
We recently spoke with Tatiana Vyunova, Senior Product Manager at HERE Technologies, for more details about how the new services tick. Fundamentally, says Vyunova, “In case of HD-GNSS Positioning, the underlying technology is the precise point positioning (PPP). And then we have our own proprietary elements. In addition, we are supporting certain RTK solutions for the platform as well. So, it looks like PPP, but is more of a PPP-like solution.”
Working with an extensive network of partners, in telecommunications, component development, and real-time GNSS infrastructure, HERE acts as an aggregator and front-line provider of real-time data.
“We would like to bring together the data providers and the sources and do the service distribution through the HERE platform,” says Vyunova. “For high-definition GNSS we have selected partners, and the HERE platform offers a marketplace where RTK players and owners of the RTK stations can link their data to the platform. And from HERE platform we distribute the service to end-user devices.”
This aggregation model could lead to an environment where the end-users, in automotive or other mass-market constituencies, could be receiving the highest precision available for their current location, seamlessly, and under a single cost mechanism. Imagine traveling in the countryside via assisted or autonomous driving, with a PPP solution providing the GNSS component of the navigation system, and it switches to an RTK solution in an urban environment (where higher precision would be available and desirable). HERE did not say such an environment was currently available, but one can see how this could become an eventuality.
To understand the potential for HERE’s HD GNSS Positioning services, it is important to understand just how deeply HERE has become currency in the navigation and location data ecosystem. The history of the company has closely tracked and influenced the trajectory of accessible geospatial “instantaneous here-ness”. The roots go back to the mid-1980s, and the US company Navteq, one of the earliest providers of digital navigation maps. Navteq was acquired by Nokia in 2007 when the boom in cellular device navigation applications was really hitting its stride, the offshoot HERE would continue to build on such synergies. HERE built global dynamic sets of mapping and navigation data, some of which would be licensed or sold to various navigation providers, and HERE continues to provide direct and indirect data and services. With the present autonomy boom, HERE is positioned well as the company that has the geo-base, expertise, development experience with communications tech, and is partly owned by a group of automotive companies. Positioning services has been in development by HERE for quite some time.
“While high-precision positioning has been there for quite some time, now we make it affordable and scalable for mass market devices and applications”
“We’ve been in positioning technology and running services globally for 10 plus years, but HD GNSS Positioning is a recent addition to the portfolio,” underlines Vyunova. “Currently, our portfolio is pretty wide in terms of positioning technologies — GNSS services, all kinds of network-based positioning services, including indoor, as well as our consulting work in these areas. We also work in the fusion of high-definition maps for automotive markets. While High Precision positioning has been there for quite some time — for high-end industries like marine, oil, and for cartography, now we make it affordable and scalable for mass-market devices and applications.”
In some ways, the current development environment for the positioning services industry is a bit like the Wild West with so many players and startups; dozens who are seeking to provide services jockeying to attract the attention of the nascent autonomous navigation market. There are startups, GNSS manufacturers building their own systems, development by individual or groups of automotive manufacturers, public/private partnerships, and more. Most provide some flavor of PPP, delivered by the web or satcom, while others seek to expand wide-area RTK or hybrids thereof.
What sets HERE’s positioning services apart from others? “We deliver in the formats which are acceptable to the industry, trying to avoid all the possible proprietary formats,” says Vyunova. “The protocols we use for submission on mass-market devices, the kinds of positioning engines on the devices, those are standardized.” The advent of dual (and multiple) frequency GNSS chips on phones and devices developed for precision navigation has enabled such high-precision services. HERE’s HD GNSS Positioning is currently geared for this dual-frequency environment, and for instance, they have developed four network-based solutions of their own. Depending on the chip in respective mobile devices, the dual-frequency might be GPS L1&L2 or Galileo E1&E5, and so on. A single frequency variant is also in the works, but that might be for limited, or lower precision applications.
“We deliver in the formats which are acceptable to the industry, trying to avoid all the possible proprietary formats”
“First, we are scalable and global,” says Vyunova. “And in formats that will not require proprietary elements; that’s important to the chip makers and solution developers. Then there is the optimization of the bandwidth as well. Then it’s all about the data connectivity and stability of the data connection. That is why we have worked on bandwidth for optimization and handling errors in the connectivity. Contrast this with the high bandwidth and error handling for RTK.” Indeed, mass-market positioning services, especially for applications like autonomous driving will need to be continuous, reliable, robust, and as error-free as possible. So being compact and optimized can help ensure at least minimal data in communications-challenged environments. It should be noted that HERE is not planning to deliver these services via satcom, as others have opted to do. Instead, the delivery will be via terrestrial comms, cellular as the default. Hence, their strong development relationships with cellular chip makers and the mobility development community.
“Sub-meter accuracy service, as we discussed has been available for high spec markets. But now with the evolution of better quality, multi-frequency GNSS chips, and growing requirements for both mobile and industrial applications, we are seeing three major segments for our high-precision services: autonomous driving, infotainment applications, mobile, and IoT devices. In these segments having absolute sub-meter accuracy will become a must,” says Vyunova.
Will HERE’s HD-GNSS Positioning be accessible for potentially any (dual frequency) mobile device? This is essentially what the company is aiming for. Vyunova showed a video of a test during our online interview; it shows the lane-level guidance that HERE HD GNSS Positioning and the HERE Lanes dataset provides. “The devices which we used in this test are off-the-shelf Android devices. And we have been using a quite basic Android API to deliver the service. Like you can see inside of the car, we have a number of mobile devices, with a simple Android application. We apply the HD GNSS corrections for off-the-shelf mobile devices, some of those in the video are Samsung, Huawei, Pixel, etc., with dual-frequency GNSS chips — nice and steady with the sub-meter accuracy.” The map shown in the video is high definition Lanes. “It was not just a beautiful visualization or visual guide for navigation, it demonstrated that it can be used to build the lane-level navigation.”
”In case of connected vehicles,” Vyunova explains, “Lanes could be the basis; then HD GNSS gives absolute position, as an additional kind of redundancy with other sensors like LiDAR sensors, or where the other methods don’t work for some reason. Then they have the cellular signals for predicted connectivity. Combined, these provide feedback loops for the connected vehicle.”
“Autonomous driving, infotainment applications, mobile and IoT devices—in these segments having absolute sub-meter accuracy will become a must”
Right now, the focus is on global coverage; the optimized reliability that mass-market applications require. But will such a service be available for other applications like surveying, asset mapping, etc.? And if so, when? “Currently we are at the point when we delivered the service to the chipset vendors and to the device OEM customers. That’s the first step. [In 2021] we are going to make it available through the SDK to developers as well,” she says. “It is not like a direct consumer service. It is through the cellular carriers or chipset makers, and then the OEM developers and SDK developers; not a direct subscription.”
So, we the end-users of high precision navigation and other geo applications may soon be using HERE’s HD-GNSS Positioning services, as we frequently do their map and navigation data, without realizing it. But that is the beauty and promise of the precision navigation and location services we are becoming accustomed to: reliable, precise, robust, seamless, and as ubiquitous as mobile data services. With a solid footing in all related elements, HERE has made a timely move with HD GNSS Positioning.
Also read: HERE Technologies ranked no.1 player in location-based services
