GNSS – Based Localization Unit for Off-Road Autonomous Test Platform

Description

Supply a GNSS-based localization unit and accompanying hardware to the NRC. The NRC will be conducting off-road driving research in rugged arctic environments involving high-fidelity terrain sensing. Such an application requires a localization unit to facilitate coordinate frame registration through time and space. The localization unit must provide high resolution data (cm level accuracy via RTK fix) at a sufficiently high update rate (= 100hz) while also being able to fuse various sensor modalities (GNSS, IMU, wheel odometry, and either LiDAR or camera feeds) to improve overall accuracy or accommodate individual sensor outage (such as GPS denial). The unit should support both base station and remote GNSS RTK correction data (through the TerraStar provider which boasts worldwide coverage). The unit must also be ruggedized to withstand the various environmental stressors which might be encountered during off-road driving in the arctic. The supplier must provide a matching RTK base station capable of RF transmission of RTK corrective data in the range of several kilometers assuming direct line-of-sight. A reduced volume footprint and power consumption are also desirable.