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The best show floor for uncrewed and robotic technology just got even better. From an expanded list of exhibitors to brand new educational theaters, the XPO Hall will help you keep a pulse on where our industry’s headed.
Sit in on major keynotes and share your perspective during workshops. Together, we will explore the design, operationalization, integration, and safeguarding of uncrewed and robotic technology.
Hear the latest ideas for integrating technology across industries and help shape the standards and systems to get us there.
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Welcome to OxTS. Ask us about sensor fusion for autonomy!
At OxTS we’re passionate about inertial navigation and how we can help our customers with our technology. With over two decades of experience in combining the best of high precision GNSS receivers and world-class inertial navigation expertise, OxTS’ products have become the industry standard for automotive testing and are widely used in other industries. Our products provide position, roll, pitch, heading and other measurements of vehicles on land, sea and in the air. Our highly accurate AV200 INS can be used to provide test engineers with accurate navigation measurements in isolation or alongside other sensors using our generic aiding interface to further enhance navigation performance. Visit the OxTS stand to find out more.
OxTS is excited to be at Xponential 2023 in Denver, Colorado. Ahead of the event, we’re teasing a few of the innovations we’re most excited about – some of which you’ll be able to see on our stand.
A multitude of sensors have to work together to make an automated vehicle do its thing. One of those, sitting quietly in the middle of things, is the inertial navigation system (INS). For the uninitiated, an INS helps the vehicle know its place in the world – its position (via GNSS data), heading, orientation, speed, and acceleration (via our high-precision inertial measurement unit). It’s often the hub for a variety of other sensors, all working in concert to give the most accurate position and orientation data possible. It’s not just what stops a driverless car from hitting a wall; it’s what enables the car to stop at a red light, to avoid a pedestrian, and to stay in the right lane on the freeway.
We’ve been building INS devices for 25 years now – and right now, we want to introduce you to the AV200 – our INS built for the automation world.
Incredible accuracy that's scalable
The AV200 is designed to reliably give precise location data, wherever it is – from open fields, to the middle of cities, to deep in a stack of shipping containers in a port. It includes quad-constellation, dual-antenna, RTK GNSS, to give you the very best position data, as well as our temperature-calibrated multi-core IMU. These technologies give the AV200 position accuracy to within 0.05m, heading accuracy of 0.2°, and velocity accuracy of 0.2km/h.
The AV200 is built using the same core technology that’s been at the forefront of global NCAP test validation, and has arguably become the preferred technology for OEMs around the world to test their vehicles in both test-track and real-world scenarios. But the AV200 has also been built specifically to address the realities of the autonomy market. After all, one INS for validation and testing is worth the investment.
Trying to scale up to equip a fleet of robotaxis, or mining haulage trucks, is another matter entirely. That’s why we’ve built the AV200 to offer incredible accuracy and precision while also being affordable enough for you to deploy it at scale in your business. In short, it’s everything you need to take your automation project to the next level, while remaining competitive in a rapidly growing marketplace.
See you on stand 2148
If you’d like to learn more about our INS technology, and see some of our latest innovations, then come and see us on our stand. We’re looking forward to meeting you!
At OxTS, we make inertial navigation systems (INS). But, we know that our devices aren’t the only tech that goes into an autonomous vehicles. You’ve got a whole host of other sensors vital to the vehicle’s operation – LiDAR sensors, cameras, wheelspeed monitors, and more. The trick, as you well know, is combining data from all these sensors to give your vehicle the best balance of accuracy, coverage, reliability, and confidence in its localisation data.
In this article, we’re sharing a new interface we’re very proud of, which makes the job of integration and fusing sensors on your automated vehicle fast and relatively simple.
Short for Generic Aiding Data interface, GAD (as we’ve started referring to it in the office) is a framework for feeding data from almost any sensor into our INS. Instead of creating custom encoders and decoders for your devices, GAD does nearly everything for you – all you need to do is tell it what data it’s receiving, the frame of your aiding sensor, and the margin of error on its measurements.
The SDK is available on our Github now (with new documentation being launched very soon), so you can download it and get integrating right now, if you want to. With advanced features including setting up your own local reference frames and extraction of aiding data to a separate file, GAD gives you a powerful set of tools for creating vehicles which don’t rely solely on GNSS data for position.
Using GAD, you can create payloads that give your vehicle accurate position data even in GNSS-denied areas such as indoors, urban canyons, or environments such as ports and mines. If you’re targeting industries or customers in this space, then GAD gives you the power to create compelling products that could make you a leader in that space.
If you’re as excited about the idea of GAD as we are, then come and see us on our stand. We’re looking forward to meeting you! You can even see videos of our Jackal robot in action, using a variety of sensors connected using GAD to navigate its way around our office.
Autonomous vehicles tend to do similar things every day. The way they start and end their day is almost always the same – parked up in a cosy garage. Which is often a bit of a pain when it comes to initialise the vehicle’s navigation system.
After all, the INS in your navigation system needs GNSS data to initialise properly – otherwise it can’t get an accurate understanding of its current position. Indoor spaces are, of course, notorious for not having great GNSS signal.
Ahead of Xponential 2023, we wanted to share with you a nifty innovation from OxTS HQ that takes care of this issue.
In short, we’ve enabled our INS devices to save their last known location and heading before shutting down. When you turn on your vehicle, as long as it is in the same position it was when you turned it off, all you have to do is keep it stationary for a short while, and the INS uses that saved data to initialise. Once completed, the vehicle can move and operate as normal. It really is that simple!
With hot-start initialisation, you no longer need to drive your vehicles outside before the automated systems can take over – you can leave the computer to park and unpark your vehicles, confident that they will still have all the data they need to do their jobs correctly and safely. Just imagine how much more comfortable it will be deploying your vehicles in the winter months, when you can do it all from inside a heated building!
If you’re as excited about hot-start initialisation and other automated vehicle innovations as we are, then come and see us on our stand. We’re looking forward to meeting you!
OxTS is excited to be at Xponential 2023 in Denver, Colorado. Ahead of the event, we’re discussing some of the latest innovations and new frontiers in autonomous vehicles. If you want to chat further, or debate with us, come find us on our stand!
We were excited to see Hexagon publish an Autonomous Construction Tech Outlook in April. It’s got some fascinating insights into how the construction sector is adopting automation, and in this blog, I wanted to share our perspective on some of those insights that have to do with the space we all know and love – autonomous vehicles.
Perspective 1: adoption of autonomous vehicles is still low
The most heavily-adopted form of automation Hexagon reports is in project management tools – which only a third of organisations are using. When you start to look at categories of automation which include the kinds of vehicles that you and I work with on a daily basis, the numbers are even lower:
26% use automated surveying tools including robotic total stations and radar, including aerial vehicles.
25% use automated construction vehicles.
17% use fully autonomous robotics, such as bricklaying, excavating, and grading robots.
Plainly, the market is still very much open and anyone who can crack the challenges we’ll talk about in a moment could stand to ride a wave of optimism and adoption in this space.
Perspective 2: hesitancies concern accuracy and cost
Hexagon’s survey cites a number of reasons why firms have yet to adopt automation technologies. Those include a lack of understanding of the value of an autonomous solution (35% of respondents), and solutions being cost-prohibitive (32% of respondents). In addition, 24% of respondents said they were hesitant about using automation as they were worried about unsupervised automation, while 20% were uncertain of the outcome.
Obviously, these things translate differently depending on the type of automation you’re talking about. When it comes to autonomous vehicles, I think these worries really boil down to two things: Cost and Accuracy.
Obviously, automated vehicles often are expensive – though, as the report rightly points out, the value they can deliver to a construction firm in terms of efficiency, speed, and safety may well make up for that increased expense. Nonetheless, companies that can offer autonomous vehicles at a lower price point (while still remaining commercially viable and technologically competitive) may well find they are able to penetrate the market.
The worries around value, outcomes, and the lack of supervision really all boil down to the same thing. Autonomous vehicles only work if they do the right thing, in the right place, at the right time. The bricklaying robot needs to be able to lay a course that’s straight and in the right place (and each new course needs to be done just right so the whole thing doesn’t fall over). The dump truck needs to take its load to the right location and dump it in the right place. And so on. Ultimately, the key factor in all these jobs – and the major challenge for many autonomous vehicle manufacturers – is getting accurate location and orientation data. If the vehicle can’t work out where it is, it can’t work out where it’s going. And these vehicles are often operating in hazardous conditions, where it can be hard to get accurate position data either via GNSS satellites or inertial measurement units.
In our opinion, the key to overcoming many of the objections firms have to autonomous vehicles is to provide the best balance of accuracy and cost – even in GNSS-denied areas.
Perspective 3: focus on the benefits, not the technology
Challenging though it may be for an industry that is exceedingly technical by nature, it’s important to remember that you need to connect your technology to the wider business it operates in.
Construction firms, according to the Hexagon report, see three key benefits associated with autonomous vehicles and survey tools:
That means that, if you’re in the game of creating autonomous vehicles and want to crack the construction market, it’s probably a good idea to communicate with your prospects in these terms. They’ll probably want to know the technical details about your product down the line, when they are evaluating suppliers, but when you first engage with then, try and relate your product back to one of these benefits. For instance, a bricklaying robot uses a highly predictable amount of mortar, which can help your customer manage their materials better. An autonomous surveying drone also allows your customers to create detailed proposals that are much more accurately costed and planned out, making the proposal more attractive and giving the firm great control over its supply chain.
If you’re as excited about the possibility of automated vehicles in construction (and other emerging markets) as we are, then come and see us on our stand. We’re looking forward to meeting you! And you can take a look at the Hexagon report in full here.
The AV200 combines dual GNSS RTK receivers and a compact MEMS IMU to deliver centimetre-level autonomous vehicle position and motion data in real-time.
The new OxTS Multi-Core IMU Technology achieves the robust navigation performance at a fraction of the size, power, and price of high-end systems.
Maximum GNSS utilisation is ensured by two multi-constellation, multi-frequency RTK GNSS receivers support aiding from the four main GNSS constellations: GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, and Beidou.
OxTS’ gx/ix™ tight-coupling technology minimises time without RTK following GNSS outages and enables each and every visible satellite to blend into the navigation solution for the most accurate solution possible.
Building the AV200 into larger complex systems is quick and easy with:
The AV200 Evaluation Kit includes: