Swift Navigation Reaches 10 Million Vehicle Milestone as It Rapidly Unlocks L3 Autonomy at Scale

The company’s Skylark Precise Positioning Service is the first and only centimeter-accurate positioning service to enable L3 autonomous vehicles to operate safely at global scale.

SAN FRANCISCO, July 23, 2024 — Swift Navigation, a leading provider of precise positioning technologies for automotive, IoT, and mobile applications, today announced that it has been awarded programs to enable precise positioning in a total of more than 10 million ADAS-enabled and autonomous vehicles worldwide. This milestone underscores the company’s pivotal role in accelerating the commercialization of autonomous vehicles at scale.

Despite significant advances in computer vision, laser imaging, HD mapping, and 5G, L3 autonomous vehicles have not yet been able to meet reliability, cost, and safety requirements needed for mass-market deployment at consumer scale. The relatively small number of autonomous vehicles on the road today are either confined to select urban environments, used only as robotaxis, offered at high end luxury vehicle price points, or lacking the safety certifications required to meet rapidly evolving regulatory requirements around the world.

Swift Navigation’s Skylark^® Precise Positioning Service is addressing three critical barriers to L3 autonomy—reliability, cost, and safety—at scale. Already widely deployed to enable lane-level navigation, ADAS, and enhanced infotainment for top automotive OEMs worldwide, Skylark improves the location accuracy of standard GNSS from a few meters to a few centimeters.

With continent-wide coverage, uniform performance and guaranteed 99.9% availability, Skylark ensures that ADAS and autonomous vehicles operate safely under all circumstances. This is crucial in challenging environments such as severe weather and roads without lane markings, where traditional perception sensors—like cameras, LiDAR, and radar—become insufficient to determine vehicle location. Skylark also significantly reduces computing costs by enabling localization with standard maps already used in navigation systems rather than data-intensive HD maps, which are required for localization based solely on perception sensors.

"We built Skylark from the ground up to unlock the next generation of location-based products, starting with ADAS-enabled and autonomous vehicles,” said Timothy Harris, Co-Founder and CEO of Swift Navigation. “Today, we are not only enabling the largest commercial deployments of those vehicles, but are already applying our technology and know-how to unlock adjacent use cases in V2X and robotics.”

As the first and only cloud-based real-time service certified to meet the stringent functional safety standards set for road vehicles (ISO 26262:2018), Skylark enables autonomous systems to meet rapidly evolving regulatory requirements at a fraction of the cost of other ISO-certified precise positioning services, which are prohibitively expensive and hosted in physical data centers.

“We are proud to be enabling ADAS and autonomous vehicle programs for the largest automakers in the world," said Joel Gibson, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Automotive and Swift Navigation. “Surpassing 10 million vehicles speaks to our deep real-world experience and our pivotal role in making higher levels of autonomy and V2X commercially viable.”

Together with Swift’s Starling^® Positioning Engine, a high precision GNSS positioning engine that integrates with existing vehicle hardware and sensors to deliver absolute position, velocity, and time with guaranteed protection levels, Skylark analyzes external threats to accuracy and delivers high integrity GNSS corrections in compliance with Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL) standards.

Available as a standalone service, Skylark is interoperable with components and positioning engines from more than 20 chipset, module, and receiver manufacturers and is configurable to meet a broad range of requirements for accuracy, coverage, power consumption, data transmission, and costs. It is widely used to enable a broad array of location-based products beyond autonomous vehicles, including outdoor robots, shared scooters, location data platforms for operational efficiency and worker safety, and augmented reality.

In addition to ISO 26262:2018, Swift Navigation also holds certifications to ISO 9001:2015 for quality management, ISO 20000:2018 for service management, ISO 27001:2022 for information security, and is compliant to ASPICE Level 3 for automotive development processes.

ABOUT SWIFT NAVIGATION

Swift Navigation is at the forefront of transforming how we navigate and understand the world. Its precise positioning solutions enable centimeter-level mapping, tracking, and navigation, unlocking vehicle autonomy, industrial automation, and digital innovation across global industries. Leading organizations leverage Swift’s technology to enhance safety, deploy autonomous vehicles and equipment, optimize logistics, and power next-generation mobile applications. Learn more about Swift Navigation’s pioneering work towards a safer and more connected future at swiftnav.com.