Standard Global Positioning System (GPS) technology is by no means new and has been in use by civilians since the 1980s and is now a ubiquitous feature of smart devices and IoT sensors. And while GPS has certainly enabled waves of innovation and business efficiency, the technology does have limitations which need to be overcome. Typically, today`s GPS service is accurate from 3 meters to nine meters depending on the topography and weather conditions, and this is unfortunately too limited for some advanced IoT services.Therefore, there is a desire in the industry to enable extremely precise position technologies which will essentially take GPS to the next level. There are a variety of new use cases that centimeter-level positioning systems will enable across a variety of industries. Connected vehicles is perhaps the most obvious example, as fully autonomous cars will need to be extremely accurate for safety reasons but this also extents to numerous applications such as drone delivery, gaming, precision agriculture, search and rescue operations, and logistics to name a few. Significant progress has been made on centimeter-level position systems in the last few years and commercial solutions are starting to appear on the market.
There are several new technologies emerging which are enabling centimeter-level positioning which is not reliant on one technology but rather an ecosystem of services. At the macro-level, there are many new satellite Global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) being deployed to complement and compete with GPS including QZSS from Japan, BeiDou from China, and Galileo from Europe. These new systems plus private sector initiatives like StarLink from SpaceX mean that there is significantly more satellite coverage as compared to previous years. 5G networks are also making an impact, as positioning protocols were included in 3GPP Release 16 and many telcos are starting to offer high-precision location as a service.
There are a few technologies which are currently popular in terms of centimeter-level positioning systems, the most popular of which are Precise Point Positioning (PPP) and Real-Time Kinetics (RTK). RTK mitigates errors by using a ground-based receiver in addition to a satellite connection to triangulate data and hence can provide accurate readings at the centimeter level, but requires expensive hardware over a wide deployment area, yet still can provide readings when satellites are unavailable. PPP on the other hand makes corrections for various factors such as weather using algorithms and global satellite data and delivers this information to a receiver placed directly on a device. Hence no ground-based infrastructure is required but data is not available when satellites are unreachable, and location data takes a longer time to estimate. Many systems in use today use a hybrid system of both technologies known as PPP-RTK.