The role of GNSS in the age of autonomous driving
Summary
The precise-point positioning real-time kinematic (PPP-RTK) correction services and the algorithms GNSS receivers use to process them are now finding their way into cars that will hit the roads in the near future. Some new receivers offer an additional output called the protection level, a concept borrowed from the aviation industry, which gives a highly reliable upper limit on the maximum position error. The consequences of falsely identifying the so-called operational design domain of an autonomous driving functionality are imposing ever more demanding requirements on the GNSS receiver than the lane-level navigation use case described earlier. These solutions have to comply with industry standards for functional safety to ensure that all the ways in which a vehicle’s hardware and software might fail is understood in detail, and that these failures can be detected and mitigated. As autonomous vehicles become more capable of safely navigating through more and more challenging scenarios, the operational design domain of each functionality they offer will grow until, ultimately, they overlap and cover the entire road network in all environmental conditions.