Skip to main content

Septentrio demos AV localisation tech

Septentrio provided GPS/global navigation satellite system (GNSS) technology for computer vision supplier Artisense’s Visual Inertial Navigation System (VINS).
October 11, 2019 Read time: 1 min


Septentrio says the GNSS technology provides centimetre-level positioning to the VINS system with the accuracy required for lane-level manoeuvring and vehicle to vehicle warning systems. Cameras and inertial sensors continue localisation as the vehicle moves into tunnels or parking garages with no line of sight to GNNS satellites, the company adds.

The VINS is expected to combine computer vision, inertial sensors and GNSS measurements to deliver 3D positioning and orientation information in any environment, even indoors.

Septentrio business development director Jan Van Hees says: “The result of our cooperation is precise localisation in any environment offering positioning reliability and redundancy needed for safety-critical applications such as autonomous vehicles or robotics.”

A demonstration at Auto.ai in Berlin offered rides around the German capital in a car featuring VINS technology. One screen inside the car continuously displayed its location as the system continued localisation in all locations including tunnels and parking garages. The second screen featured a real-time 3D point-cloud reconstruction of the car’s surroundings.

Related Content

  • January 26, 2012
    Debating road user charging systems
    Are pre-launch trials of charging systems the way to improve public acceptance? Or is the real key a more robust political attitude? Here, leading system suppliers discuss the issue. The use of distance-based Road User Charging (RUC) is now well established, at least for heavy goods vehicles on strategic roads. However demand management for all vehicles, whether a distance-based charge or some form of cordon scheme, has yet to make significant progress. This is in spite of the logic and equity of RUC being
  • July 23, 2012
    Improving the positional accuracy of GNSS road user charging
    The European GINA project is intended to address and overcome many of the institutional, technical and public acceptance hurdles currently faced by satellite-based road user charging schemes. Dave Tindall and Denis Naberezhnykh, TRL, and Laure Dezes, ERF, write. Pay-as-you-drive Road User Charging (RUC), whereby demand (or congestion) is managed by applying appropriate tariffs in order to encourage drivers to make their journeys at less busy times, on less congested routes or even on different modes, could
  • March 31, 2020
    Toyota demos HD maps for Tokyo AVs
    Toyota's Research Institute-Advanced Development has demonstrated high definition (HD) maps for autonomous vehicles (AVs) for surface roads in Japan with a relative accuracy of less than 50cm.
  • December 6, 2017
    Vision technology lifts blinkers from tunnel vision
    Sony’s Jerome Avenel looks at how advances in imaging technology are helping improve safety. On the 24th March 1999, a Belgian truck transporting flour and margarine through the 11.6km Mont Blanc tunnel caught alight when a cigarette stub entered the engine induction snorkel, lighting the paper air filter. The fire left over 30 dead and many more injured. At the time, the Mont Blanc tunnel disaster was the world’s worst tunnel fire.