Vodafone tests Sapcorda GNSS for cargo tracking

  • March 1, 2021
  • Steve Rogerson

Vodafone is testing GNSS technology that can track vehicles, drones and precious cargo remotely within centimetres.

Autonomous trucks need to warn e-bikes of their presence to avoid accidents, first responders need to know the position of critical medical drones with pinpoint accuracy, and operators need to locate precious cargo precisely. Vodafone customers will have applications that do all that and more thanks to technology it is testing.

Vodafone has used precision positioning technology to track a vehicle remotely to within 10cm of its location, an improvement of more than three metres compared with current standard satellite based systems. It did this in partnership with German positioning provider Sapcorda, using Vodafone’s global IoT platform, which has 118 million connections.

Pinpoint accuracy is critical to the acceptance and mass adoption of autonomous vehicles not just on the road but in factories, airports, dockyards and any site where machines are in motion. A matter of centimetres could be crucial to ensuring the safety of passengers on a driverless bus, or knowing the precise location of a medical drone. It will also allow an autonomous lorry to mind other road users, including cyclists, whose e-bikes can automatically transmit their position and intended direction of travel.

“We might not be able to locate a needle in a haystack yet, but we are getting close,” said Justin Shields, Vodafone business platforms director. “What we can do now is take new digital services like this one, integrate it with our global IoT platform and fast networks, and offer it securely at scale to many millions of customers. Our in-building 5G and IoT services already allow manufacturing plants, research laboratories and factories to carry out critical, and often hazardous, precision work with robots. Now we are applying the same levels of accuracy to the outdoor world.”

The precise positioning service is an example of how Vodafone is redefining its network and technology on a telco-as-a-service (TaaS) model. By identifying key network capabilities, and making them available through common APIs in a cloud platform, Vodafone can deliver software, video and data applications at scale, in addition to gigabit-capable connectivity.

Vodafone believes large enterprises will benefit hugely from these technologies. For example, they will be better able to locate critical assets, precisely align machines such as driverless trains at platforms, and let farmers, airports and fleet operators know the exact whereabouts of their autonomous vehicles, buggies and cars at any time.

Vodafone IoT-enabled vehicles, machinery and devices, when linked with Sapcorda’s network of GNSS receivers and augmentation technology, improves location accuracy by correcting for things such as the curvature of the earth, atmospheric delays and clock differences of global positioning satellites. This offers corporations hyper-precise positioning that they can use to ensure a safe environment for their employees, their customers, the public and their machines.

Combined with video and on-board diagnostics, the technology will also allow vehicle operators to carry out accurate location sensitive remote inspections and even pause machines such as grass cutters on public footpaths when they encounter people.

Vodafone is adopting the precise point positioning – real-time kinematics (PPP-RTK) method with ground level GNSS stations to achieve the best error correction. Signals from global positioning satellites are processed and GNSS corrections are sent out to enhance the position accuracy of the vehicles receiving them. Vodafone can equip any number of vehicles with an in-built IoT SIM, and deliver the positioning data at speed using its gigabit-capable networks.

Vodafone recently put this to the test by tracking in real time the exact lane that vehicles were travelling in during a combined journey of over 100km in varying weather conditions. Sapcorda provided the data feed, which enabled the GNSS signal to be corrected, to deliver the critical level of positional accuracy. A precise positioning service complements the existing asset tracking and fleet telematics already provided by Vodafone Business for enterprises across 54 countries.