How a leading automotive manufacturer achieves centimeter-level autonomous driving with Point One

At a glance: A leading automotive manufacturer partnered with Point One Navigation for over five years to achieve centimeter-level precision crucial for advanced driver assistance systems. Point One's Polaris RTK corrections network delivers the accuracy needed for autonomous functions while maintaining customer data privacy through an innovative cloud architecture that keeps sensitive location information within the manufacturer's own infrastructure.

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Why precision matters in autonomous driving

In an era of rapid automotive innovation, discussions around autonomous driving often center on technologies like LiDAR, radar, and cameras. Yet, a fundamental layer often goes unnoticed by the everyday consumer: the critical need for precise location. For autonomous vehicles, knowing exactly where you are isn't just helpful, it's essential. While technologies like radar and cameras deliver relative positioning, the only sensor in an automotive stack that can deliver absolute positioning, a nonnegotiable for safe and reliable autonomous operation, must use Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), of which GPS is one constellation. But traditional GPS accuracy, which can be off by several meters, simply isn't precise enough for vehicles making split-second decisions that often have major safety implications. For a leading automotive manufacturer, achieving the centimeter-level accuracy needed for advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) across their growing fleet required looking beyond standard solutions.

When a vehicle needs to confidently maintain its lane, adapt its speed to traffic, or navigate complex environments, positioning accuracy becomes the foundation of safety and performance. These functionalities aren't just about "seeing" the road, they demand an unwavering understanding of where the vehicle is, down to the centimeter. This is where Point One Navigation steps in, providing the high-fidelity, reliable positioning that is the bedrock of next-generation automotive technology.

Unlocking centimeter-level confidence, even on the daily commute

The automotive industry doesn’t just require knowing where vehicles generally are, the industry demands centimeter-level accuracy, delivered with reliability and security, at scale. Point One Navigation's Polaris RTK corrections network addresses the fundamental need for precision by delivering over five million high-accuracy GNSS corrections daily. GNSS is made up of a constellation of satellites; GPS, Galileo, GLONASS, and BeiDou which orbit Earth, transmitting signals that enable receivers on the ground to determine their location. Real-time Kinematic (RTK) technology delivers corrections to errors that GNSS signals pick up while traveling through the troposphere and ionosphere making traditional GNSS location 100X more accurate, reducing error margins from meters to centimeters.

Point One’s automotive partner needed a corrections network that could not only provide high-precision GNSS corrected data (both True RTK and Virtual RTK, as well as L-Band) but also seamless integration into the automotive partner’s existing cloud infrastructure, all while protecting customer privacy and insulating user-location data. Point One achieved this in two ways: 

• Secure and robust infrastructure: an expansive network of Point One designed and deployed secure base stations, engineered for automotive excellence and longevity.
• Privacy-centric cloud ecosystem: Point One created a cloud ecosystem that protects customer data, even from being accessed by Point One itself.

A secure and reliable network

Polaris is the world’s largest, professionally-run RTK corrections network and works especially well with the unique challenges of the automotive market. Point One’s base stations are designed, manufactured, and assembled in-house in the USA, in a dedicated facility with long-term supportability, maintainability, and reliability as first principles. These core values have underpinned a five year ongoing partnership with this leading automotive manufacturer and form the backbone of a highly reliable and secure global network that’s built to last.

Because Point One maintains a status as an independent service provider (where others have been acquired and integrated into other entities or rely on backing from other consortia), Point One is nimble in deployment and design of base stations that offer tangible advantages:

• Faster base station deployment through a streamlined vertically integrated process that is kept in-house. While legacy players may take months or years to deploy a base station, Point One can have survey-grade base stations installed in days that are actively monitored and remotely managed, around the clock.
• Power and communication redundancy that reduce outages and increase reliability, contributing to 99.9% uptime and extended base station lifespans.
• More secure design of components and housing leading to a tightly integrated station that drastically reduces complexity and potential attack surfaces, while maintaining industry leading monitoring through three modalities: acceleration, temperature, and satellite signal quality monitoring on a continuous basis.

The culmination of this work is a dense, reliable, and secure network of base stations that can be deployed efficiently and are tested to perform even in the most adverse conditions over many years. Setting up the infrastructure necessary to deliver centimeter-accuracy is important, but Point One’s automotive partner, serving a market where location data could reveal sensitive driving patterns and personal habits, also needed a greater level of customer data protection. 

Privacy-centered architecture

A key innovation in this partnership was the development of a unique privacy-focused architecture for delivering Point One’s correction data to the automotive manufacturer. Recognizing the sensitivity of vehicle location data, Point One developed a hybrid data-sharing approach that empowers any Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) to maintain data governance within their own infrastructure. This innovative design ensures customer data remains within the OEM's ecosystem, addressing critical privacy concerns and allowing for independent scalability while still leveraging the high-accuracy positioning data. This unique data infrastructure gives added benefits to the OEM:

• Turn-key compliance with data privacy laws like GDPR since the data is stored at the country of origin.
• Infinite horizontal scalability of infrastructure to support any number of future vehicles or devices.

This design keeps customer data within the manufacturer's own ecosystem while still providing the precision benefits of the Polaris RTK corrections network. The integration was implemented in just one week, with the automotive manufacturer hosting Point One software containers within their cloud to handle correction data without exposing sensitive location information.

A five year collaboration beyond corrections

Point One’s automotive partner wanted to extend their relationship beyond RTK corrections, and so they also partnered with Point One on the development of a Software Defined Radio (SDR) that runs on STMicroelectronics silicon. This enables their vehicles to directly receive and decode L-Band signals, providing an automotive-grade chipset integrated directly into their hardware, a testament to the trust and expertise they place in Point One.

While the automotive partner's solution uses Point One’s RTK corrections and an SDR solution, they chose to develop their own in-house positioning engine to control their software destiny. This decision underscores a core tenet of Point One's philosophy: open standards and compatibility.

"We believe in empowering our partners with choice. Our commitment to open standards means you can leverage our technology without being locked into a proprietary ecosystem. It's about technical merit, not walled gardens." - Aaron Nathan, Founder & CEO

Point One embodies these values by championing open standards and actively participating in industry bodies and standards committees to ensure interoperability. Where standards fall short, Point One innovates openly, providing not just specifications but functional open source code.

For this automotive manufacturer, Polaris became more than just a corrections network, it became a symbol of a partnership built on trust, innovation, and a shared vision for the future of mobility. By prioritizing privacy and embracing open collaboration, Point One helped them lay a secure and precise foundation for their continued success.

Results: Precision with flexibility

By choosing Point One Navigation, the automotive manufacturer gained the essential centimeter-level accuracy needed for their advanced driver-assistance systems, with a commitment to long-term growth and support. The privacy-centric architecture satisfied critical requirements for data control, while Point One's open standards approach ensured seamless integration with the manufacturer's own systems.

This partnership, already in its fifth year, demonstrates how Polaris RTK corrections empower automotive innovators with the precision, privacy, and flexibility needed to build the next generation of vehicles. For drivers, it means ADAS features that function with greater confidence and predictability, creating a safer and more enjoyable driving experience.

The result is a technological foundation that supports not just today's automotive innovations, but tomorrow's as well, positioning both companies at the forefront of the autonomous driving revolution.

Ready to explore how Polaris can be tailored to your specific requirements? Reach out to our team today for a personalized discussion and POC. Contact Sales