High-Precision Location for Everything That Moves

High-Precision Location for Everything That Moves

GPS gets you to the right street. Point One gets you to the right door, down to one or two centimeters. In this episode, I talk with Aaron, founder and CEO of Point One Navigation, about what it takes to deliver location 100 times more accurate than standard GPS, and why no single technology can do it alone.

We start in orbit and work our way down. Aaron explains how Point One uses every major satellite system (GPS, Galileo, GLONASS and BeiDou) and removes about 95 percent of the signal error, without any new satellites or chips. He also gives an honest take on the pros and cons of the new low Earth orbit constellations, and on why they won't magically give you centimeter accuracy indoors.

We then get into building an RTK correction network from scratch: thousands of one-by-one meter land leases, in-house hardware designed to run for 10 years in the middle of nowhere, and why "cables are the enemy." From there we talk about sensor fusion, and how combining RTK, low-cost motion sensors and physics-based models gets high performance out of cheap hardware.

We also cover the "multiplayer world," where robots, autonomous cars, forklifts and drone fleets share their location to coordinate safely. Then we look at sovereign infrastructure and the impact of GPS jamming, the hard problem of moving smoothly between indoors and outdoors, and how better maps and better location keep driving each other forward.

Aaron also talks about FUSE, a conference Point One is hosting on November 19th in San Francisco. If you're building anything that depends on location, this one is for you.

fuse.pointonenav.com/sf discount code: FUSEMAPSCAPING