📋 Tender Overview
Researchers of TU Delft VU Amsterdam and VSL have developed a navigation system with an accuracy of 10 centimetres. Rather than satellites the system relies on mobile telecommunication networks to determine time and location thereby increasing robustness and accuracy in particular in urban settings.The so-called SuperGPS project financed through the Open Technology programme offers an alternative for current satellite-based navigation systems such as GPS. These systems have various shortcomings such as buildings reflecting or blocking the GPS signal. This limits the systems accuracy making it unsafe to be used by for example automated vehicles in urban areas. The project devised a solution to this problem by utilising the telecommunication network thereby circumventing the blocking of satellite signals by structures in the built environment. The researchers connected an atomic clock to the fibre optic communications network allowing perfectly timed messages to be broadcast the essential ingredient for highly accurate timing and positioning in navigation systems.SuperGPS was also inspired by mobile networks when trying to limit disturbances in radio signals. Navigation system receivers may misinterpret the customary small bandwidth radio signals when these are reflected by buildings. By using a number of related small bandwidth radio signals spread over a large virtual bandwidth their system can recognise and unscramble these reflections increasing positional accuracy. The breakthroughs achieved do not only hold promise for the future of automated vehicles and quantum communication but also for everyday navigation and mobile networks.
