Supercorrelation enables pinpointed location accuracy and security in urban areas

Last Updated: 18/11/2022 16:04     Created at: 18/11/2022 15:53

NAVISP has awarded positioning company FocalPoint with a €850k grant to accelerate the design and build of a real-time Supercorrelation™ GNSS receiver (S-GNSS) -  to demonstrate game-changing accuracy improvements in receiver performance for chipset providers. 

The grant will allow the UK Deeptech company to develop a live demonstration and a rapid prototyping platform for their Supercorrelation technology - accelerating its application to products and businesses reliant on accurate and reliable location, including smartphones, wearables and autonomous vehicles. With a mission to improve the location accuracy and reliability of every mobile device, the S-GNSS receiver that FocalPoint will build will enable the trial and exploration of new use cases for Supercorrelation in areas that rely heavily on GNSS accuracy from the automotive and logistics sectors  - to pedestrian navigation and anti-spoofing applications . This grant will help evaluate the importance of this software to each use case. 

Supercorrelation™ is a patented, chipset-level software product offering improved sensitivity, accuracy and integrity via its unique software-based capability of determining the angle-of-arrival of satellite signals. It enables a new class of mass-market GNSS receiver that can measure the directions of the incoming signals without the need for high-cost antennas, allowing the receiver to ignore reflected signals and fake, ‘spoofed’ signals, making them more accurate in cities by a factor of 10 and more resilient against spoofing attacks by criminals. No extra hardware or infrastructure is required, making Supercorrelation a cost-effective and environmentally friendly option to addressing the age-old limitations of GNSS.

Dr Ramsey Faragher, Focal Point’s President and CTO commented: “We are delighted to receive the grant from the European Space Agency NAVISP programme. We have developed FocalPoint into a world leading GNSS technology provider and I’m excited by the potential of these market opportunities. If you drive a car, wear a sports watch, order take-out for delivery and use a device to navigate - our technology is paving the way for our everyday location devices to work more accurately, efficiently and securely. It really is an exciting phase in our development, the possibilities are endless”.    

Rafael Lucas Rodriguez, Head of the NAVISP Technical Programme commented, “I believe that Supercorrelation is the most significant improvement to GNSS receivers since the invention of Assisted-GNSS and I am very proud that we are supporting FocalPoint Positioning through the NAVISP programme”.

Diagram of an S-GNSS receiver, showing the benefits of Supercorrelation