• This article provides a concise overview of the importance of GPS technology in our lives and introduces Swift Navigation, a leading company in the GPS industry.
• It highlights insights into the significance of GPS technology, learning about Swift Navigation's innovative solutions, and understanding the impact of GPS on various industries and applications.
• Timothy Harris, co-founder and CEO of Swift Navigation.
GPS technology is one of the most important things we have today. With only one click, you can share your present position and let your friends know how to find you there. No need to sketch or cause confusion in order to go anywhere. Our generation has never used the paper map.
You also share your location with your family and loved ones who are always looking out for you. Today, we just offer a scan on business or personal cards, and by scanning it in your phone, that quickly and easily indicates the way to get to your location.
Google Maps can help you find good restaurants, fun things to do, or nearby petrol stations; You can always track your path in Uber/Ola; and SnapChat has a feature that lets you see where your friends are.
Every Gen-Z kid's dream is to drive a Tesla automated car, which allows us to relax while it takes us to the desired location, which can literary not work without GPS. With just one click, we can track our phones, cars, and packages from Swiggy or Amazon to find out when they will arrive and where they are right now.
How did it come to be?
Invented by the Naval Research Laboratory to track the soviet union’s satellites, today, it has slowly and steadily crept into our cars, ships, airplanes, cameras, construction equipment, agricultural machinery, laptops, and of course, smartphones.
We often take for granted how amazing it is that GPS, which allows us to locate our location anywhere on the planet utilizing satellites 20,000 miles away from one another and broadcasting at the power of a light bulb.
Flying Cars, Robots, and many things we had assumed to be in the future and we are making a path for that through all these technologies and AI; All this for the ease of living. But for that, we need trust and protection. This generation would literally trust AI precisions more than humans, which is not bad actually. AI is developed by humans only in order to be more accurate and the report proves that AI has better precisions, this has a great future ahead.
Not everyone can afford a Tesla -
We created automated automobiles for those who cannot or do not want to drive. Self-driving cars could be a safe and dependable form of transportation. A self-driving automobile would allow elderly or physically challenged people to enter without endangering other people.
Self-driving automobiles might also be advantageous in cities with inconsistent public transportation. Autonomous vehicles are able to reach places with poor infrastructure. Using advanced systems and algorithms, computers will effectively do away with unnecessary human error.
With self-driving cars, major accidents caused by drunk or distracted driving won't be an issue. According to estimates, self-driving cars can cut down on collisions by up to 90%. There are numerous companies that offer GPS positioning for business vehicles. But here we present Swift Navigation, the most reliable and affordable GPS.
Founders
Here, Colin Beighley, Timothy Harris, and Fergus Noble founded a company that manufactures GPS trackers. Their creative process began when they were tasked with developing a precise GPS tracker for high-altitude wind turbines for their previous company.
They all are physics majors and have worked on, particularly, Tracking systems. Once they got to work on planning and creating a solution for that issue, they saw it could potentially do far more than just help them launch our wind turbines; it might also be the key to enabling an autonomous future.
Unfortunately, that company shut down, so instead of joining the Google X project, where all of their other coworkers joined, they chose to launch their own GPS tracker business. They started off with a small seed investment and experimented in Santa Cruz's barns, woods, and farmhouses.
Today, they are a significant and reputable enterprise. Their global team of about one hundred positioning experts, with a San Francisco headquarters, is aiming to enable autonomous apps that will improve the safety, accessibility, and productivity of our lives.
The Swift in Technology -
Swift navigation was established on the basis that affordable high-accuracy GPS solutions should be provided. They maintain that foundation by providing a comprehensive line of precise, inexpensive, and simple-to-integrate GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) solutions for autonomous applications.
Using GPS, a device determines its location on Earth in relation to a system of orbiting satellites. As accurate as this system is, there are a lot of potential problems. That's not the best method for directing automobiles through densely populated metropolitan areas.
Swift products can correct inaccuracies brought on by things like orbital uncertainty of a satellite or disruptions from the sun's radiation reflecting off the Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field using their global network of hundreds of sensors. These sensors' cloud service gathers and processes data, which is subsequently provided to our Arm-powered positioning software.
Swift Navigation offers accurate locating solutions for mass-market, mobile, autonomous, and automotive applications. The Swift Navigation ecosystem of positioning solutions for autonomous applications has grown out of what started as the first low-cost, high-accuracy, real-time kinematic (RTK) receiver in the GNSS market.
The SkylarkTM precise positioning service, a cloud-based corrections service that uses confidential, cutting-edge algorithms to give SSR (State Space Representation) adjustments to autonomous vehicles, mobile devices, and mass-market applications, provides countrywide GNSS corrections.
Contrary to older technologies that keep users connected to fixed base stations or regional CORS networks, Skyark easily distributes a constant stream of data to devices across continents via Internet connectivity.
The Starling® positioning engine software is a hardware-independent, integrated software solution that enhances measurements made by third-party GNSS chipsets, microprocessors, and inertial sensors to support the calculation of precise position, velocity, and time (PVT) and to provide true precision and integrity capabilities. It is a platform-independent, receiver-agnostic, advanced GNSS and dead reckoning positioning engine.
Swift Navigation's centimeter-level accurate Piksi® Multi and ruggedized Duro® and Duro Inertial RTK receivers are paving the way for autonomous cars to navigate and comprehend the environment in the future.
Swift Navigation provides centimeter-accurate GPS positioning technology for autonomous vehicles, such as the Piksi Multi multi-band, multi-constellation GNSS receiver. Millions of devices worldwide use Swift's precise positioning technology platform, which increases location accuracy from a few centimeters to a centimeter-level.
Users across sectors rely on Swift's technology, which makes driving safer, last-mile delivery and commercial transport operations more efficient, mobile device accuracy higher, and new opportunities in rail, robotics, and machine control.
Market Role -
At this time, Swift Navigation's yearly revenue is anticipated to be $42.4M. In June 2017, Swift Navigation got $34 million in venture capital. $100 million was just raised in Series D fundraising in 2022.
New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Eclipse Ventures, EPIQ Capital Group, FM Capital, OVN Capital, TELUS Ventures, TWM Venture Co., Buckley Ventures, and Schox Venture Capital also participated in the round, which was jointly led by SK and Potentum Partners.
The money will be used by the business to increase operations and accelerate expansion. The business has so far secured more than $200 million in capital. To expand its global reach and support its expanding workforce, Swift created offices in Seoul, South Korea, and Tokyo, Japan.
Swift Navigation is enabling a world where fields produce themselves, drones fly safely, and autonomous transportation can get you home thanks to its ingenuity and technology, which was recognized by Inc.'s 2016 and Forbes 2017 30 Under 30 lists.
Services -
Swift's reliable GNSS solutions work well in a variety of environmental scenarios, and fast convergence times get your project up and running in a matter of seconds. For automakers, Swift provides lane-level precision positioning technology. OEMs may easily add precise positioning into fleets thanks to the Skylark precise positioning service.
Rail identification and car localization are made simpler by Swift Navigation's accurate positioning technologies. Swift is a tried-and-true system that gives shippers, fleet managers, and OEMs access to sophisticated navigational capabilities.
Swift's solutions are simple to incorporate into your current fleets, resulting in increased operational effectiveness and reduced expenses. Applications in industry, precision agriculture, construction, and machine control benefit greatly from Swift's ecosystem of precise positioning GNSS solutions.
Autonomous vehicles were more science fiction than reality when they first came on the market in 2012, and there was disagreement over whether they would ever be a technology that the general public could afford.
Today, production models from a number of manufacturers increasingly include basic autonomous driving features. They have grown with that market, refining their technology for uses in rail, drones, agriculture, construction, and more. In 2019, they will also publicly introduce our portfolio of automotive products.
They anticipate that additional levels of automation will be made accessible to the general public as Swift Navigation technology advances alongside the market. They expect that Level 2 systems, which can currently steer a car down a highway under human supervision, will develop into Level 3 systems, which have more advanced self-driving capabilities, within the next five years.
In addition, they anticipate that Level 4 and 5 systems—which will be intelligent enough to drive themselves in cities and suburbs—will become a reality within the next ten years. Swift employees are aware that as technology advances, it becomes quicker, wiser, and more precise, giving machines a better sense of their location in the world.
Swift helps users track trains and increase safety on continent-wide rail networks, and it offers a precise position (enhanced RTK) to cutting-edge machine control and guidance systems for robotics, agriculture, and construction, among a variety of other applications in both emerging and established GNSS markets.
They get to play a key role in the development of autonomous vehicles in the future, which will literally be the means by which you will be able to work safely, put food on the table, and do so with increased security and productivity that will help feed the globe while also removing people from some of the riskiest workplaces.
Edited by Shruti Thapa
