Positioning to centimeter-level improves agriculture

Precision-navigation approaches that emphasize backward compatibility help farms reap more value from autonomous operations.

Precision navigation, which is essential to autonomous machines, is knowing a moving vehicle's absolute and relative position in 3D space accurately, reliably and repeatably. The cost for precision navigation with position information down to the centimeter level has become a far less significant barrier to broad deployment. This price drop has come with enhanced, not diluted, performance.

One reason for the cost decrease has to do with the sheer volume of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers on the market. GNSS encompasses the satellite-based GPS used in North America as well as other global positioning systems such as GPS, Galileo, Glonass, BeiDou, NAVIC (former IRNSS) and QZSS.