Low Cost RTK GPS Receiver Launched on Kickstarter

Swift  Navigation,  a  Santa  Cruz,  CA  based  startup,  is  launching  a  new  GPS receiver  product  via  the  crowdfunding  website  Kickstarter.

A few attributes that make Piksi different from other GPS receivers :

• Precise : Normal GPS receivers give positions that are accurate to a few meters. The Piksi RTK GPS system is accurate to few centimeters – 100 times more precise.
• Low-cost : $900 for a complete Piksi RTK system – the cheapest RTK system on the market is about $7000.
• Open : The software running on Piksi is open source, allowing users to customize and tune the receiver for their particular application.

The company’s aim is to open up this level of positioning precision to much more cost sensitive applications. Widely available, low cost, centimeter level positioning will allow UAS to do a lot of interesting things – precise autonomous takeoff / landing, GPS-based heading and attitude determination, precise geo-referencing of aerial photography, etc. The company believes that providing RTK GPS at this price range will allow the use of civilian UAS and other autonomous systems in a lot of applications that are not currently feasible – due to both cost and accuracy constraints.

Quick  facts:

• RTK  Functionality  -­  Single  centimeter  relative  positioning  precision
• Low  cost  -­  $900  for  complete  RTK  System
• Open  source  software  and  board  design
• Fast  (50  Hz)  position/velocity/time  updates
• Low  power  consumption  :  500  mW  typical
• Small  form  factor  :  53  x  53  mm,  32  grams

Please  see  the  Piksi  datasheet  for  full  technical  specifications.

Swift  Navigation  was  founded  in  2012  by  Fergus  Noble  and  Colin  Beighley.  They  previously  worked  at  Joby Energy,  a  company  that  developed  high  altitude  wind  turbines.  There  they  developed  an  RTK  GPS  receiver used  to  guide  successfully  guide  UAV’s  in  high  dynamic  flight  paths  (greater  than  8  g’s  of  acceleration).  They subsequently  branched  off  to  form  Swift  Navigation,  in  order  to  pursue  their  interest  in  creating  high  quality,  low cost  positioning  products.

Source: Press Release

[PS -the subscription was sold out within two hours…! – Ed.]