San Francisco-based tech firm Swift Navigation today announced nationwide coverage for its network-connected Skylark precise positioning service. Full contiguous United States (CONUS) coverage is designed to reduce initialization times to seconds, ensuring high-accuracy—and high-integrity—positioning is available when customers need it.
Skylark is built for autonomy at scale and delivers lane-level precision, with safety-of-life integrity, required by mass market automotive and autonomous applications, according to Swift Navigation. Skylark is a scalable network delivering a continuous stream—via the cloud—of robust, reliable, multi-constellation, multi-frequency corrections, with the latency, security, precision and reliability required for safety and autonomy.
“Since Skylark was introduced last year, the Swift network team has been hard at work deploying infrastructure across the country,” stated Rob Hranac, COO of Swift Navigation. “This extensive network helps remove hurdles in precise positioning for our customers and we look forward to partnering with those customers as we expand Skylark internationally.”
Skylark is architected to address the needs of automotive Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) by supporting ASIL-rated (Automotive Safety Integrity Level) systems, Ntrip2 (Networked Transport of RTCM via Internet Protocol) connections in Cloud Reference Station (CRS) mode and is State Space Representation (SSR) ready—an emerging industry format. Skylark is hardware-independent, giving customers choice in today’s rapidly improving and commodifying GNSS sensor ecosystem. OEMs are able to benefit from the lane-level positioning Skylark delivers using a host of third-party receivers in addition to Swift’s PiksiMulti and Duro GNSS receivers.
Unlike legacy Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) services that are designed for smaller regions and Precise Point Positioning (PPP) services that suffer from slow convergence times, Skylark is a high-performance hybrid nationwide U.S. network that delivers initialization times in seconds, better than 10 centimeters of accuracy and integrity required by the most demanding safety-of-life critical applications. When used with Swift’s Starling positioning engine, Skylark is reportedly capable of delivering protection levels (PL) down to one meter and Target Integrity Risk (TIR) down to 10 -7 / hour. Engineered for automotive functional safety standard ISO 26262 (ASIL B), Skylark is the only positioning network designed and built from the ground up to support next-generation GNSS applications, connected car, V2X and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS).
Skylark packages GNSS precise positioning as an affordable subscription service for ease in deployment for large scale autonomous vehicle fleets. Eligible customers are invited to get started with a free trial or pilot program; visit swiftnav.com/skylark to learn more.
