OxTS has teamed up with RoboSense to meet the needs of OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers as they improve their perception and navigation systems.
RoboSense is an industry leader in high-precision perception solutions. Top automotive manufacturers around the world use RoboSense LiDAR sensors to help test the safety and reliability of ADAS and autonomous driving (AD) features.
Earlier this year, Jonathan Deacon, Product Manager at OxTS, spoke with RoboSense and discussed how OxTS technology works alongside LiDAR and how sensor fusion is helping OxTS expand into new industries.
Q. We understand that OxTS’s technology is expanding into new fields. Can you tell me a little bit about the evolution
of the company?
Jonathan Deacon: OxTS was founded by two Oxford University graduates in 1998 and, very quickly, our inertial navigation solutions became the product of choice for vehicle testing around the world.
In the years that followed, new products and software solutions were added to our portfolio. These include RT-Range, which helps vehicle manufacturers measure the range between vehicles and other targets such as infrastructure and lane markings. RT-Range is used by more than 120 vehicle manufacturers, proving grounds, and new car assessment program (NCAP) test facilities around the world for validating ADAS systems.
Today, OxTS hardware and software applications have expanded from ADAS testing and validation to autonomous vehicle navigation and mapping. Our continually evolving georeferencing capabilities allow us to calibrate sensors, create precise point clouds and improve GNSS-denied navigation systems.
Q: How are you helping to advance your customer’s solutions?
Jonathan Deacon: At OxTS, we have the expertise to help our customers “navigate anywhere” by creating navigation systems that can perform in the harshest environments. Our solutions couple our deep industry-leading knowledge of inertial systems with newer technologies such as RoboSense’s lidar.
Our approach is sensor fusion, in which we see lidar as a key technology. Different sensors collect distinct data, and customers need support to integrate the most valuable information into their systems to enable safe and reliable navigation systems. We accomplish this through the OxTS Generic Aiding Data (GAD) interface. GAD provides a simple data structure that our INS navigation engine understands. This allows customers to incorporate the most important outputs from the complementary perception technologies they use, such as simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), into their central navigation engine (OxTS INS) to improve performance in GNSS-constrained areas.
One example of this is that we are enabling our customers to confidently move ADAS testing from proving grounds to the open road, using data from other sensor technology, to overcome the challenges associated with GNSS signal disruption. This can happen in places like urban canyons, where the street is flanked by buildings on both sides, creating a canyon-like environment. As noted, we are also extending these solutions to our mapping customers to further boost point cloud accuracy.
For the complete interview on advanced driver assistance CLICK HERE.
