Highly accurate navigation for city dwellers TU Braunschweig involved in Horizon Europe project on cloud-based localisation service in cities

The EU project “egeniouss” takes apps for navigation and positioning in urban areas to the next level. Apps for cyclists and pedestrians, but also professional surveying and mapping, drones and autonomous vehicles need accurate and secure satellite-based navigation. It is not uncommon for street canyons to interfere with satellite signals, making many apps unreliable, unsafe or even unusable. For example, road users can get into critical situations due to incorrect positioning, which in the worst case can lead to accidents.

Technische Universität Braunschweig will work on the “egeniouss” project for three and a half years together with European partners under the leadership of the AIT Center for Vision, Automation & Control (Vienna). The result will be a highly innovative cloud-based visual localisation technology. Satellite-based positioning will be supplemented by a comparison of the images taken from the surroundings (e.g. of building facades) with the image data stock in the cloud. This enables a much more precise positioning down to a few decimetres compared to the several metres that conventional satellite navigation can provide. Using “egeniouss” requires a mobile device – such as a smartphone, smartwatch, tablet or drone – equipped with a camera, GNSS receiver and a powerful processor.

Two institutes of TU Braunschweig are involved in the project. The Institute of Flight Guidance will be responsible for the system architecture and integration of all software components involved, as well as designing the interface to the user in the form of a platform-independent API (Application Programming Interface). The Institute of Geodesy and Photogrammetry‘s role in the project is the acquisition, processing and storage of geodata in the cloud. In addition, novel methods for AI-supported image registration are being developed.

Link:

To the original AIT report (PDF)