GSSI partners with MIT Lincoln Laboratory to develop LGPR for autonomous vehicles

US-based Geophysical Survey Systems (GSSI), manufacturer of ground penetrating radar (GPR) equipment, has entered into a licensing agreement with Massachusetts Institute of technology (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory to build and sell commercial prototypes of their localised ground penetrating radar (LGPR) system, which helps autonomous vehicles navigate by using subsurface geology. The partnership will make prototype systems available to the self-driving vehicle industry.
September 11, 2017 Read time: 2 mins
US-based Geophysical Survey Systems (GSSI), manufacturer of ground penetrating radar (GPR) equipment, has entered into a licensing agreement with 2024 Massachusetts Institute of technology (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory to build and sell commercial prototypes of their localised ground penetrating radar (LGPR) system, which helps autonomous vehicles navigate by using subsurface geology. The partnership will make prototype systems available to the self-driving vehicle industry.

 
The agreement builds on GSSI’s new engineering initiative, which focuses on using GPR to solve difficult problems that cannot be solved with any other technologies. Led by newly appointed Vice President of Research and Development, David Cist, an expert engineering team is focusing on commercialising the new technology.
 
Engineers at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, who developed LGPR, have demonstrated that features in soil layers, rocks, and road bedding can be used to localize vehicles to centimetre-level accuracy. The LGPR technology has been tested for lane keeping even when snow, fog, or dust obscures above-ground features.
 
The LGPR sensor uses high-frequency radar reflections of underground features to generate a baseline map of a road's subsurface. Whenever an LGPR vehicle drives along a road, the data can be used as a reference map. On subsequent passes the LGPR equipped vehicle compares its current map against the reference map to create an estimate of the vehicle's location. This localisation has been demonstrated to be accurate to within a few centimetres, in real-time and at highway speeds, even at night in snow-storms.

Location Based Systems Detection, Monitoring & Machine Vision Classification & Data Collection

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Jenoptik measures out the future
    June 15, 2022
    The speed of tech changes means Jenoptik is redrawing how it sees itself. Adam Hill catches up with Stefan Traeger and Kevin Chevis at Intertraffic Amsterdam to find out more about ‘extended reality’…
    Read More
  • Cohda trials V2X tech in Norwegian tunnel
    March 20, 2019
    Cohda Wireless has carried out a trial of Vehicle to Everything (V2X) technology in Norway’s Bjørnegård tunnel. The idea was to demonstrate the ability of Cohda’s V2X-Locate solution to provide accurate vehicle positioning in areas where GPS systems often run into difficulty – such as in tunnels or underground car parks. The company’s chief technical officer, Professor Paul Alexander, says GPS positioning can be off by up to 40m in such environments – which would have a significant negative impact on
    Read More
  • Rethink required to reduce road transport’s environmental impact
    March 15, 2016
    Against a background of a renewed focus on limiting the rise in average temperatures, Colin Sowman looks at a project that is taking a holistic approach to the environmental impact and safety of road transport. At the COP21 meeting in Paris last December, almost 200 nations agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in an effort to keep the rise in global temperatures to 2°C) compared with pre-industrial levels. The transportation sector is a major contributor to the production of CO2, one of the main green
    Read More
  • Yeti more AV snow-clearing by Semcon
    April 29, 2019
    There is a lot of debate about the place of autonomous vehicles on our roads – but a Swedish company is already ploughing ahead with driverless snow clearance on airport runways, writes David Arminas Femcon, a Swedish applied automation company, has started an on-site project to clear snow from runway landing lights using autonomous vehicles (AVs). Most often, this time-consuming job has to be done manually because of the intricate manoeuvres needed to avoid damaging the lighting systems. The trial pro
    Read More

Highlighted Content