A man leaps from an airplane at 10,000 feet. His wingsuit’s positioning system allows his position, velocity, and altitude to be tracked—even when he’s flying upside down, or if satellite signals are blocked. Watch

In heavy seas, a helicopter without a pilot lands itself on a moving ship. Watch

On a very busy street, a driverless vehicle negotiates pedestrians and other obstacles, delivering its passengers safely to their destination. Watch

What is this, a James Bond movie? Nope, it’s just another day at Hexagon’s Autonomy & Positioning division, headquartered in Calgary.

“Our guiding principle is to improve the world through technology,” says Sheena Dixon, Segment Manager, New Markets. “For me, that means I get to play with cool new tech and tinker with new gadgets every day.”

AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES

In 2019, the autonomous/driverless car market was valued at US$24.1 billion in 2019 and is forecast to exceed $200B by 2025. The one thing that will keep autonomous cars from reaching their market potential is simple: safety. And that’s why Hexagon plays such a central role in this exciting and important industry.

Precise positioning is central to a vehicle’s ability to get safely from Point A to Point B. Every second that vehicle is on the road, it must be able to monitor its environment—pedestrians, other cars, buildings, curves, unpredictable motorcyclists, etc.—and adapt to changing road conditions.

Hexagon’s Autonomy & Positioning division brands include NovAtel, VERIPOS and AutonomouStuff, all contributing unique technology to provide assured autonomy and positioning. Hexagon combines data and distance measurements from satellites, LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), RADAR (RAdio Detection And Ranging), and vehicle cameras to tell the autonomous vehicle’s system precisely where it is—amazingly, down to the centimetre—and how fast it’s going.

In 2018, Hexagon acquired US-based AutonomouStuff, which provides R&D platforms, products, software, engineering services, and data intelligence to aid in the advancement of robotics and autonomy for more than 2,500 customers worldwide. Combined with Hexagon’s decades-long expertise in positioning intelligence, it’s created a global powerhouse in autonomous development.

Autonomy in vehicles isn’t limited to the roads; Hexagon is applying this technology across markets in mining, construction, agriculture, defense, and more. Autonomy is the end-goal of the precise positioning technology that Hexagon develops.

“Our guiding principle is to improve the world through technology.”

CALGARY: A GLOBAL LEADER IN GPS TECHNOLOGY

Hexagon’s Autonomy & Positioning division is part of Hexagon, a global leader in sensor, software, and autonomous solutions that puts data to work in boosting efficiency, productivity, and quality across industrial, manufacturing, infrastructure, safety, and mobility applications. The Calgary-based Autonomy & Positioning division leverages technology and products from its own brands, which include:

Hexagon | NovAtel, a company specializing in providing precise positioning technology for almost three decades
Hexagon | VERIPOS, a company of specialists in positioning solutions for the offshore marine oil and gas industry
Hexagon | AutonomouStuff, a world leader in supplying R&D platforms, products, software and engineering for the advancement of robotics and autonomy systems

Today, Hexagon is one of the world’s leading providers of integrated global positioning solutions on land, sea, and in the air—and is to a great extent responsible for Calgary’s reputation as an international hub for geomatics engineering. Hexagon focuses on satellite positioning systems (known as Global Navigation Satellite Systems, also known as GNSS).

An example of GNSS would be GPS (Global Positioning System) which most are already familiar with. We use it all the time on our phones when we’re hiking or driving somewhere new. Back in the late 1980s, engineers working at NovAtel started on the earliest commercial version of GPS in order to introduce greater precision into oil and gas exploration and drilling. Over three decades later, Hexagon is still providing leadership in this technology.

LIVING LABS

Hexagon has an established partnership with the City of Calgary, whereby the company is permitted to use a vacant snow-dump lot as a controlled space for testing the positioning and navigation capabilities of autonomous vehicles. “Without the City, we wouldn’t be able to test our technology,” says Dixon. “It’s not like we can just drive around on public roads to measure the safety and accuracy of autonomous test vehicles.”

Hexagon’s first project with the City involved the ELA (“electric autonomous”) shuttle, which moved some 4,500 visitors, 12 at a time, between the Calgary Zoo and TELUS Spark during a trial in September 2018. The vehicle’s navigation system featured assured positioning technology from NovAtel, which provided ELA with centimetre-level accuracy along its one-kilometre route. As the first autonomous shuttle to operate in western Canada, ELA was a pilot project to judge the long-term viability of using autonomous vehicles in the city.

HIGH-PRECISION POSITIONING

Current satellite positioning technology approximates a vehicle’s positioning to between 1.5 and 3 metres, in optimum conditions.

At the CES 2020 technology show in Las Vegas, Hexagon, together with French sensor maker Valeo and Hyundai, presented new, low-cost, high-precision positioning (HPP) technology capable of pinpointing a vehicle’s location within centimetres. While ELA was fully autonomous within a closed route, the CES vehicle operated on an open road with mixed traffic. Rather than operating autonomously, the CES vehicle was driven manually with autonomous systems running in the background to demonstrate the positioning system’s accuracy and awareness of its surroundings. The demonstration showed that vehicle autonomy is closer than ever through Hexagon’s positioning solutions.

Part of the success in the positioning solution that Hexagon demonstrated at CES was their TerraStar X technology, which uses satellite positioning data to refine the onboard receiver’s calculations. This added layer of precision increases the vehicle’s awareness of its position on the road, and therefore improves the safety for passengers and fellow drivers. This precise positioning capability will help cities manage traffic flow, make onboard navigation systems more informative, and obviously will also improve autonomous safety features in the future.

THE BIG LIFT

When it came time for Shell to decommission its gigantic Brent oilfield marine platforms, they used positioning technology from Hexagon to help execute the stunning lift of 25,000 tons of steel from their pillars to a ship deck in NINE seconds. (You should really watch this video, too.)

The whole enterprise depended upon the precise and stable positioning of the world’s largest construction vessel to within half a metre of the support pillars so that it could seamlessly take the weight of the multi-deck structure once it was freed from its moorings. All this took place in the North Sea, where waves can reach 12 metres in height and gale force winds are not uncommon. The technology used to accomplish this included high accuracy augmentation Precise Point Positioning (PPP) services, which make small, precise adjustments to satellite readings at the centimetre, decimetre or metre level, under extreme operating conditions.

“As of 2017, 25% of all Canadian geomatics, navigation, and global positioning firms were headquartered in Alberta.”

UNIVERSITY MATERIAL

Hexagon has a very close relationship with the University of Calgary’s geomatics department, which is Canada’s largest. An estimated 50% of the company’s engineering staff is drawn from UofC graduates, and Hexagon is a regular presence on campus, staging mock interviews, panel presentations and coffee chats with students. The company sponsors equipment for the Autonomous Robot Club and supports engineering capstone projects via consultation and equipment use. While the company’s internship programs are not specific to the UofC, the majority of their interns do come from that institution. Dixon notes that the UofC team that went to the National Geomatics Competition in Waterloo this year was entirely comprised of Hexagon Interns.

WHAT’S NEXT

Just weeks ago, Hexagon announced the launch of its first autonomy positioning and sensing kits for the agriculture market with its new demonstrator vehicle, an autonomous research and development tractor. In collaboration with NovAtel and AutonomouStuff, Hexagon has been working to bring more assured positioning to autonomy in agriculture. The autonomous tractor features everything from object detection and relative localization and mapping, to absolute positioning through GNSS technology. Built to illustrate the viability of Hexagon’s new positioning and sensing kits, the tractor also incorporates safety-critical learnings with situational and environmental awareness, and manual remote control when needed. The tractor forms part of Hexagon’s Smart Autonomous Mobility solutions portfolio, work the company is doing to enable and accelerate the development of autonomy in agriculture.

Watch for a number of other exciting projects on the horizon from Hexagon, including autonomy in industries like agriculture and mining. For the curious, you can check out the most recent edition of their annual Velocity Magazine, which you can find on their website here.

To learn more about how Hexagon is empowering an autonomous future, visit Hexagon Positioning.

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Hexagon: ‘Positioning’ Calgary as a world leader in autonomy & robotics