u‑blox and Qianxun Spatial Intelligence, a leading high precision positioning service provider, have announced that they are joining forces to deliver high precision positioning solutions to the Chinese market. By coordinating their product offerings, they seek to meet growing demand for increased positioning accuracy for mass market applications. Some of the areas driving up demand for high precision positioning services in China are IoT tracking devices such as those used on shared bikes, as well as automotive, UAV, and robotic vehicle applications.
u‑blox is bringing to the partnership its market‑leading high precision GNSS receivers. Its recently announced u‑blox F9 multi‑band positioning platform uses integrated Real Time Kinematic (RTK) technology to process the high precision positioning correction data provided by Qianxun SI, delivering down to centimeter‑level positioning accuracy for wide‑ranging applications. It enables even faster and more robust performance by leveraging a greater variety of GNSS signals.
Two major advancements have enabled sub‑meter‑level positioning accuracy for mass market applications. The first is modern GNSS correction services that constantly monitor GNSS signals to determine positioning errors caused, for example, by atmospheric distortions, and wirelessly transmit correction data to compensate for these errors to millions of GNSS devices. The second is a new generation of small, power‑efficient, and affordable GNSS receivers that are able to use the correction data to achieve such high levels of accuracy.
Qianxun SI has already laid the groundwork for the large‑scale expansion of high precision positioning in the IoT era. Based on the BeiDou Satellite System, which is compatible with GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, Qianxun SI’s high precision positioning service is built on the nationwide “ONE Network,” composed of more than 2,000 Continuously Operating Reference Stations (CORS), and utilizes powerful proprietary algorithms. It offers vehicles and other applications a range of 24‑7 high precision positioning services in most regions of the country. By the end of 2018, Qianxun SI’s dynamic centimeter‑level service will cover the entire mainland of China.
