At a glance: Since 1998, Latitude GPS has built its reputation on guidance that holds. Now it’s putting 100% of its autonomous tractor kits into the fields of France and French-speaking Africa, on Point One’s owned RTK network. Latitude GPS spent 28 years earning the trust of more than 7,000 farmers. When it set out to build fully autonomous tractors, it needed positioning that repeats pass after pass, on any terrain, with no room for drift. It evaluated Point One’s RTK corrections network against the local radio beacons the industry has trusted for decades and found better reliability, faster convergence, a more secure signal, and economic advantages. Point One now runs across Latitude GPS’s entire guidance range, from assisted steering to the autonomous kits headed for commercialization.
Precision agriculture doesn’t forgive a crooked line
In the field, the margin for error is zero. Every overlap in seed, fertilizer, or pesticide is wasted input or damaged crop, every gap is yield left on the table. A guidance system that wanders even a few centimeters between passes turns a day’s work into a day’s rework.
Latitude GPS knows this as well as anyone. Founded in Venon, France, in 1998, the company supports more than 7,000 customers across France and French-speaking Africa, offering end-to-end precision agriculture: satellite guidance, mechanical weeding, and drone solutions. Its next step is the frontier of the industry, a 100% autonomous tractor kit, with mass commercialization occurring in 2026 and 2027.
Autonomy raises the stakes on positioning. A human driver can correct for a signal that drifts. An autonomous tractor cannot. It needs corrections that are fast to converge, repeatable field after field, and secure enough to build a driverless machine around.
Beacon-grade reliability, without the beacon
For decades, local radio beacons set the benchmark for reliable RTK in agriculture. They work but each one covers a limited area, has to be installed and maintained site by site, and ties a farm’s precision to a single point of failure. Scaling that model across two continents and thousands of clients is slow and expensive.
Latitude GPS wanted the reliability of a beacon without the constraints of hosting one. As CEO Emmanuel Vauquelin put it: “We were looking for an alternative offering a precise, secure signal with the best value for money.”
Point One offered a different foundation: a corrections network that Point One designs, manufactures, and operates itself, rather than crowd-sourcing it or borrowing it from a third party. Base stations sit roughly every 40 km across the operating region, the densest configurations in the industry, so correction quality stays consistent whether a machine is working open fields or broken terrain. Stations are built in-house with facilities in Strasbourg, France and run from secured sites, which matters when the endpoint is a tractor with no one in the cab.
What the field testing showed
Latitude GPS didn’t take the network on faith. Through extensive field testing, its team verified that Point One’s corrections deliver performance equivalent to the local beacons that have long defined the category. Four advantages stood out:
- Fast convergence. The network reaches a reliable fixed solution quickly, so machines spend time working instead of waiting for a lock.
- A secure signal built for autonomy. The robustness Latitude GPS needs for its 100% autonomous tractor kits, delivered over a signal hardened for driverless operation.
- Dense, uniform coverage. Base stations every 40 km hold correction quality across the full operating region, not just near population centers.
- Fast deployment. Direct technical collaboration between the two teams turned integration into a quick, efficient rollout across Latitude GPS’s product line.
Because Point One delivers corrections over standard NTRIP and works with nearly every RTK GNSS receiver on the market, Latitude GPS could roll the signal across its full guidance range rather than a single product. A modern GraphQL API handles provisioning and fleet management as deployments scale.
“With Point One, we found a level of performance that fully convinced us to offer this solution across our entire GPS product range.”
Emmanuel Vauquelin, CEO, Latitude GPS
The road to full autonomy
The partnership is the positioning foundation under Latitude GPS’s autonomous roadmap. Fully autonomous tractors demand corrections that are fast, repeatable, and dependable under real field conditions, the exact profile Point One is built to deliver.
“Precision agriculture doesn’t forgive imprecise positioning,” said Lucas McKenna, Director of Europe at Point One. “We are proud to support Latitude GPS as they deploy autonomous guidance systems that demand fast, reliable, and repeatable positioning under real-world field conditions.”
Ultimately, this partnership represents a pivotal shift in agricultural technology. By replacing legacy radio-frequency beacons with Point One’s robust and dense RTK network, Latitude GPS is optimizing its current guidance solutions and establishing itself as a reliable, high-performance foundation for the future of fully autonomous farming. This partnership ensures that farmers in France, Africa, and beyond can operate with unprecedented precision and confidence as the industry moves toward a driverless frontier.