KDDI on Tuesday announced its investment in Swift Navigation, a company that offers an ecosystem of GNSS positioning solutions for autonomous vehicle, mobile and mass-market applications, through the KDDI Open Innovation Fund 3.
KDDI aims to offer centimeter precise positioning for a range of autonomous applications that include automotive autonomy, advanced driver assistance features and connected car, drone, rail, and industrial machinery.
The benefits of integrating autonomous functionality into everyday applications abound. Whether used for self-driving cars, rail fleets, autonomous robotic machine navigation, autonomous flight for unmanned aerial vehicles, last-mile delivery logistics, construction safety, or shared mobile positioning, the requirement to achieve autonomy is accuracy.
Standard GNSS positioning is accurate to three to five meters which is not suitable for such autonomous systems, said KDDI. For higher levels of autonomous capability, high-precision localization is required to deliver accuracy down to the centimeter. Swift achieves this accuracy through its cutting-edge positioning algorithms that provide a continuous stream of multi-constellation (including the U.S. GPS system and Japan's QZSS), multi-frequency GNSS corrections for a highly-available service that delivers high accuracy and world-class integrity at a continental scale.
Swift is already available across the United States and Europe, and is expanding to Asia. KDDI has already done the PoC in Japan with Swift Navigation, and through this investment, KDDI will work with Swift to support its mission, business growth, and development and expansion of precise positioning products for the autonomous future.
