ELEVATING POSITIONING AND NAVIGATION IN CITY-BASED CONSUMER APPS

The EU project egeniouss makes accurate and reliable navigation available for everyone. Navigation and positioning apps for cyclists, solutions for professional surveyors and mappers, drone operators and automated driving applications rely on satellite-based navigation signals.  But in cities, urban canyons – shaped by tall buildings – often interrupt these satellite signals and make many applications unreliable, unsafe or even unusable. Cyclists lose track, turn late, and evoke critical situations which in the worst-case can lead to accidents. Safety for autonomous driving requires exact and reliable positoning at all times.

Three complementary use cases to explore the full potential of AAA-PNT

In collaboration with six European partners, the AIT Center for Vision, Automation & Control (AIT VAC, project leader) and the AIT Center for Technology Experience (AIT TE) successfully started the 3,5 years lasting Horizon Europe project with three exemplary use cases - a cycling app, a surveying app, and drone delivery (e.g. for medical supplies) to develop “AAA-PNT – Affordable, Accurate and Assured Positioning, Navigation and Timing”. The egeniouss GNSS- and cloud-based visual localisation technology will be applicable to any device with a camera, computing power and a GNSS receiver (e.g. smartphones and -watches, tablets, drones). By the choice of the use cases, egeniouss contributes to more safety and comfort making our cities more liveable in the age of digitalisation. Two smartphone-based use cases, namely bicycle navigation and smartphone-based surveying & mapping, and one robotic use case – drone delivery – will demonstrate complementary features of the combined EGNSS – Visual Localisation service.

Coordinator Phillipp Fanta-Jende from the VAC, emphasises that “Although egeniouss will be compatible with other satellite navigation systems, such as GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou etc., only the European GNSS infrastructure offers the ideal foundation to enable egeniouss’ full potential to democratise high-performance positoning and leverage its high transferability to other value-added services.” AIT researcher Helmut Schrom-Feiertag from the Center for Technology Experience adds: "It is important to involve the most varied and diverse users and relevant stakeholders in the process right from the start. This is important so that the solutions from the three use cases are then accepted in practice and used with pleasure."

Besides the three quick starters – firstly GNSS-based mapping, secondly navigation & tracking for cyclists and pedestrians and thirdly drone based operations - egeniouss lays the basis for the improvement of other location-based and -dependent services and the development of still unknown service opportunities in growing market segments (e.g. wearables in the health & lifestyle market) and fills technological gaps for previously hyped solutions offered too early in the markets (e.g. AR/MR augmentation devices like Google Glasses and other geo-advertising and geo-tagging services in the tourism and social network segments). Drone-based delivery will be applicable to the emergency market to fulfil the high standards in safety & time critical applications. egeniouss-equipped tramways in urban environments (rail market) can use egeniouss for accurate and low-cost inspection of rail infrastructure and enable accurate tracking of trams for enriched passenger information systems. Autonomous vehicles greatly benefit from egeniouss’ accurate localisation capability for safety reasons and better navigation.

Facts  & Figures:

• 3 Mio. EUR funding
• 7 partners from 4 countries
• December 2022 – May 2026

Partners:

• AIT - Austrian Institute of Technology (AT)
• Technical University of Braunschweig (GER)
• GeoNumerics (ES)
• Crayon (AT)
• CATUAV (ES)
• Centro Español de Logística (ES)
• OPENGIS.ch (CH)

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or EUSPA. Neither the European Union

Projekt egeniouss

Horizon Europe - CORDIS