ELEMENT 1 WORKPLAN 2022 EXPLAINED. VIDEO AND PRESENTATION OF THE INFODAY

Last Updated: 29/06/2022 13:58     Created at: 26/04/2022 06:40

On April 19, 2022, the ESA NAVISP team presented the 2022 plan of the activities to be run under the NAVISP Element 1, the part of the programme devoted to the Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) technology innovation. The workplan was fully approved in February 2022.

The activities will contribute to the advance of the PNT technology and to the preliminary definition of new services, to be followed up in the other NAVISP Elements, the Element 2 and Element 3.

About 50 people from industry and research institutes followed the webinar and participated in the subsequent interactive Q&A session.

Please check the content of the presentation, watch the video, and stay tuned for the release of the corresponding Invitation To Tenders (ITTs) on the NAVISP and ESA esastar website.

The main topics covered in the Q&A session (starting at ~58:00) are listed below:

• EL1-065 eLoran antenna for handheld devices: on top of the eLoran carrier frequency, also other (lower) LF frequency ranges will be considered at least initially in the specification of the antenna.
• EL1-066 Deeply Coupled GNSS Vector tracking loop robust solution for autonomous vehicle: the expected TRL of the activity output is confirmed to be between 5 and 6 (up critical function demonstrated in relevant environment). The relevance of deep vs tight/loose and RAIM requirements has also been discussed.
• EL1-063 RIS-aided wireless localization and mapping: the RIS might help require in principle bidirectional communication, another way is to configure static phase shifts to guarantee a certain coverage where there is no line-of-sight.
• EL1-064 Block-box for an optimised GNSS spectrum monitoring network using AI: the usage of the Block-box is very simple, can be put in-line between an existing Antenna and Receiver, in a transparent way.
• EL1-067 Precision Agriculture-High precision coordinate and alignments transfer: the requirement of the 5mm accuracy might seem excessive, but, on one hand, new applications will benefit from this accuracy and, on the other hand, the objective is to ensure that this accuracy is delivered in a configuration including a tractor plus pulled implement.
• EL1-068 Biosensor and PNT Integration: the most probable application might be fire-fighters monitoring inside a building on fire, sport might be another important one, transport of live animals could also be considered.
• EL1-069 Enabling high performance PNT in lunar environment: TRL4 is requested (breadboard verification in laboratory environment), which for this lunar activity might mean demonstration in the laboratory merging measurement acquired in the field with measurement simulated. The most important difference between Earth and Moon environment will be the capability required to visual devices, moreover, also there are plenty of satellites on Earth but few satellites (with main mission communication at the beginning) on the Moon.