u-blox and Sapcorda partner for delivery of SAPA GNSS

Industrial and automotive markets will be among those to benefit from massively scalable, affordable, and high quality GNSS augmentation services.

The SAPA Premium GNSS augmentation service, commercially available since January 2020, sets itself apart from other GNSS correction services by combining the best of both worlds: global PPP-services and local RTK-services. Its distinguishing features include fast convergence times, performance homogeneity over continental coverage areas, bandwidth efficiency, and a dedicated, purpose-built GNSS network. SAPA services are broadcast in the SPARTN format via cellular communication, with geostationary satellite communication on the L band to follow shortly.

SPARTN stands for Safe Position Augmentation for Real-Time Navigation. This industry-driven, open, and free-to-use format has been specifically designed for broadcast distribution of modern SSR (state space representation) GNSS corrections targeting mass market applications.

Contrary to legacy OSR (observation space representation) correction services, which require two-way communication between GNSS receivers and correction service providers, Sapcorda’s SSR correction service can be broadcast to receivers continent-wide. This allows it to efficiently deliver high precision GNSS positioning to any number of end users, resulting in unlimited scalability and protection of private data. The SAPA Premium service is currently available in the continental US and EU, with plans to enhance it as SAPA Premium Plus, offering integrity and functional safety compliance, which are essential for safety-critical applications.

Such a mass market-compatible, high precision GNSS positioning solution meets growing customer demand for seamless, accurate position and navigation and is considered a prerequisite for a broad range of emerging applications. In industry, they include autonomous vehicles, such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGV), machine automation, and other advanced navigation applications. Emerging automotive applications include automated driving (ADAS), lane-accurate navigation, telematics, and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication.

“Our coming solution, based on the SPARTN open correction interface, will effectively unleash the growth potential of a new mass market for high precision positioning technology,” said Thomas Seiler, CEO of u-blox.

“By adopting the SPARTN interface, we ensure interoperability between our respective services and products, so that customers who use Sapcorda’s SAPA Premium GNSS augmentation technology on their u-blox F9 GNSS receivers will have 100 percent confidence that the service and the hardware work together seamlessly and meet their performance expectations, both during evaluation and in operation,” added Vladimir Stoyanov, Product Strategy for high precision GNSS at u-blox.

“Entering into this partnership, we were in perfect alignment with u-blox in terms of our strategic vision to develop scalable high precision GNSS solutions for the mass market and enable emerging applications and use cases that are far beyond the capabilities of classic GNSS correction services,” said Botho zu Eulenburg, CEO of Sapcorda. “With this collaboration with one of the first receiver manufacturers to support the open SPARTN format, we are offering our customers seamless integration and a future-proof solution.”