Swift Navigation Reaches 10 Million Vehicle Milestone as It Rapidly Unlocks L3 Autonomy at Scale
23 July 2024 - 5:00PM
UK Regulatory
Swift Navigation Reaches 10 Million Vehicle Milestone as It Rapidly
Unlocks L3 Autonomy at Scale
The company’s Skylark Precise Positioning Service is the
first and only centimeter-accurate positioning service to enable L3
autonomous vehicles to operate safely at global scale
SAN FRANCISCO, July 23, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --
Swift Navigation, a leading provider of precise positioning
technologies for automotive, IoT, and mobile applications, today
announced that it has been awarded programs to enable precise
positioning in a total of more than 10 million ADAS-enabled and
autonomous vehicles worldwide. This milestone underscores the
company’s pivotal role in accelerating the commercialization of
autonomous vehicles at scale.
Despite significant advances in computer vision, laser imaging,
HD mapping, and 5G, L3 autonomous vehicles have not yet been able
to meet reliability, cost, and safety requirements needed for
mass-market deployment at consumer scale. The relatively small
number of autonomous vehicles on the road today are either confined
to select urban environments, used only as robotaxis, offered at
high end luxury vehicle price points, or lacking the safety
certifications required to meet rapidly evolving regulatory
requirements around the world.
Swift Navigation’s Skylark® Precise Positioning
Service is addressing three critical barriers to L3
autonomy—reliability, cost, and safety—at scale. Already widely
deployed to enable lane-level navigation, ADAS, and enhanced
infotainment for top automotive OEMs worldwide, Skylark improves
the location accuracy of standard GNSS from a few meters to a few
centimeters.
With continent-wide coverage, uniform performance and guaranteed
99.9% availability, Skylark ensures that ADAS and autonomous
vehicles operate safely under all circumstances. This is crucial in
challenging environments such as severe weather and roads without
lane markings, where traditional perception sensors—like cameras,
LiDAR, and radar—become insufficient to determine vehicle location.
Skylark also significantly reduces computing costs by enabling
localization with standard maps already used in navigation systems
rather than data-intensive HD maps, which are required for
localization based solely on perception sensors.
"We built Skylark from the ground up to unlock the next
generation of location-based products, starting with ADAS-enabled
and autonomous vehicles,” said Timothy Harris, Co-Founder and CEO
of Swift Navigation. “Today, we are not only enabling the largest
commercial deployments of those vehicles, but are already applying
our technology and know-how to unlock adjacent use cases in V2X and
robotics.”
As the first and only cloud-based real-time service certified to
meet the stringent functional safety standards set for road
vehicles (ISO 26262:2018), Skylark enables autonomous systems to
meet rapidly evolving regulatory requirements at a fraction of the
cost of other ISO-certified precise positioning services, which are
prohibitively expensive and hosted in physical data centers.
“We are proud to be enabling ADAS and autonomous vehicle
programs for the largest automakers in the world," said Joel
Gibson, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Automotive
and Swift Navigation. “Surpassing 10 million vehicles speaks to our
deep real-world experience and our pivotal role in making higher
levels of autonomy and V2X commercially viable.”
Together with Swift’s Starling® Positioning Engine, a
high precision GNSS positioning engine that integrates with
existing vehicle hardware and sensors to deliver absolute position,
velocity, and time with guaranteed protection levels, Skylark
analyzes external threats to accuracy and delivers high integrity
GNSS corrections in compliance with Automotive Safety Integrity
Level (ASIL) standards.
Available as a standalone service, Skylark is interoperable with
components and positioning engines from more than 20 chipset,
module, and receiver manufacturers and is configurable to meet a
broad range of requirements for accuracy, coverage, power
consumption, data transmission, and costs. It is widely used to
enable a broad array of location-based products beyond autonomous
vehicles, including outdoor robots, shared scooters, location data
platforms for operational efficiency and worker safety, and
augmented reality.
In addition to ISO 26262:2018, Swift Navigation also holds
certifications to ISO 9001:2015 for quality management, ISO
20000:2018 for service management, ISO 27001:2022 for information
security, and is compliant to ASPICE Level 3 for automotive
development processes.
About Swift Navigation
Swift Navigation is at the forefront of transforming how we
navigate and understand the world. Its precise positioning
solutions enable centimeter-level mapping, tracking, and
navigation, unlocking vehicle autonomy, industrial automation, and
digital innovation across global industries. Leading organizations
leverage Swift’s technology to enhance safety, deploy autonomous
vehicles and equipment, optimize logistics, and power
next-generation mobile applications. Learn more about Swift
Navigation’s pioneering work towards a safer and more connected
future at swiftnav.com.
A photo accompanying this announcement is available at
https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/d0f24881-9864-45db-a718-b15ef71073e3