Generic Aiding
Easily integrate multiple sensors into your development project to ensure navigation in any environment.
Traditionally GNSS technology has been the go-to pairing with inertial sensors to create an accurate and absolute position and motion solution. But sometimes GNSS isn’t reliable or even available. OxTS’ Generic Aiding interface provides the ability to utilise different types of sensors with inertial technology in combination with, or instead of, GNSS information.
Coupling GNSS data with other sources of information enhances performance levels and overcomes the weaknesses of GNSS, to maintain the navigation performance you require in any environment.
What is Generic Aiding?
Generic Aiding supports the fast integration of sensors, such as cameras, wheel speed sensors, UWB, and/or other aiding sources – either individually or in combination – in addition to GNSS. This enables rapid development of new products and shortens time to market. By utilising alternative aiding sources to GNSS, the navigation solution becomes more flexible allowing robust positioning solutions in typically difficult environments like urban canyons; or opening up completely new environments like indoors that would be impossible when relying on GNSS-aiding alone.
Why include Generic Aiding in your operations?
The short answer – Generic Aiding changes the way our customers deal with projects. It improves the quality of the work they’re able to do, whilst at the same time saving them time and money. Some key benefits are highlighted below:
Complete Framework Solution
Generic Aiding provides a framework that allows you to feed additional external sensor data into the OxTS Navigation Engine where it is fused with the inertial data in the Kalman filter alongside, or instead of, GNSS information.
Rapid Development Timeframe
Generic Aiding enables rapid development of new and novel aiding sources that can be immediately integrated into the existing navigation engine without the need to create complex encoders/decoders specific to every new sensor.
OxTS Navigation Engine
The OxTS navigation engine can use data in the form of position, velocity, acceleration, or heading to aid the output. Any sensor that can give some form of measurement in these formats can be integrated with the Generic Aiding interface.
What types of sensor can be used with Generic Aiding?
OxTS Generic Aiding can help you quickly and easily integrate additional sensors into your navigation engine to improve performance. Example sensors include:
- Optical speed sensors
- Ultra-wideband positioning
- Magnetometer heading
- Vehicle wheel speed through CAN bus
- External fibre optic gyro
- SLAM based sensors
If the sensor you want to integrate isn’t listed, contact our Engineers and we can help you formulate a plan to integrate your sensor of choice.
Applications
The OxTS Generic Aiding framework has been designed to use in multiple applications.
Easy integration of novel aiding sources, such as vehicle wheel speed sensors, provides new opportunities to test vehicles in environments where unstable GNSS conditions may have proven difficult to overcome – like urban canyons.
The ability to easily integrate new sensors, such as magnetometer heading sensors, into payloads gives Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and other mobile mapping operators the ability to collect more valuable data.
Safety is of paramount importance to autonomous vehicle manufacturers. Integrating multiple sensors into operating systems gives vehicle manufacturers confidence that they will realise the precision they need – whatever the conditions.
Applications in an industrial setting are almost endless. From retail, to logistics, manufacturing, and construction the need for industrial autonomy is growing, and so to is the need for solutions like OxTS Generic Aiding.
Example results
We tested data collection with, and without, OxTS Generic Aiding. Follow this link to see the results.
