RTK GPS for Robotics: Getting Real 1-2 cm Accuracy If you are building an outdoor robot, standard GPS is often not accurate enough. A typical GPS receiver can have a position error of 1-10 meters. This may cause the robot to miss waypoints, drive outside its working area, or collect inaccurate data. Modern GNSS receivers with RTK (Real-Time Kinematic) corrections can improve positioning accuracy from a few meters to just
Are you developing a drone and not sure which RTK module is best for your project? Here is a side-by-side comparison of the three recommended dual-antenna modules. All three provide centimeter-level RTK positioning and GNSS-based heading (yaw) that works even with short antenna baselines (as low as 50 cm). They also support roll and pitch output in dual-antenna mode. Get centimeter-level RTK positioning and high-accuracy attitude (heading, roll & pitch)
I spend a fair amount of time reading about what’s coming down the pipe in farming tech. Some of it is obvious marketing fluff. Some of it actually makes you stop and think about how you’d use it on your own ground. A recent piece I came across from TrugemTech got into the combination of 5G gateways and RTK, and it pulled together a few things I’d been turning over in my head.
I’m not the kind of farmer who buys new tech just because it’s shiny. Usually, I wait until the neighbour has tested it for a couple of seasons and worked out the bugs. But when the local co-op started pushing RTK boundaries a few years back, I figured I’d give it a go on a few fields. Just to see. Honestly? Some of the benefits I expected. Some I didn’t.
I’ve been working with GNSS for long enough to remember when getting a reliable heading meant babying a magnetometer and praying there wasn’t a steel beam anywhere nearby. A couple of years ago, we were testing an autonomous warehouse rover in a hangar—cold, echoey, full of metal shelving. The heading kept drifting, sometimes by 15 degrees or more. We swapped cables, updated firmware, tweaked filters. Took us three days to
Precision is the heartbeat of modern geomatics, but for decades, that heart has skipped a beat whenever a surveyor stepped under the “green shield” of a forest canopy. While Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) positioning has mastered the open field, the dense, multi-layered environments of forest stands have remained a final frontier of sorts—riddled with signal drops, “float” solutions, and the dreaded “multipath” ghosts. However, a landmark study from the University of
The intersection of high-precision satellite positioning and cultural heritage has traditionally been a costly affair, reserved for large-scale excavations with significant budgets. However, a recent paper presented at the IMEKO TC-4 International Conference on Metrology for Archaeology has demonstrated that “low-cost” doesn’t have to mean “low-precision.” The study, titled “Intensive archaeological survey at Piscina Torta: use of a low-cost RTK portable kit to materialise a UTM grid on the ground,”
By: Editorial Team, Precision-GNSS.com Ref: Sensors for Digital Transformation in Smart Forestry (BOKU, 2024) In the world of high-precision positioning, we have long lived by a binary code: Fix or Float. It is a digital “all or nothing” that dictates whether a surveyor can proceed or must wait, frustrated, for a better satellite geometry. But as we look at the recent research from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna (BOKU),
