Photonic Inertial Sensors for Automotive (PISA)
Partners: Zero Point Motion Limited (Lead), WAE Technologies Limited, University of the West of England, Royal Institute of Navigation.
Inertial measurement units (IMUs) are comprised of three accelerometers and three gyroscopes to measure across six degrees of freedom (6DoF).
Micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) IMUs typically exhibit a high degree of noise and drift, limiting their use in safety and mission critical systems, such as autonomous vehicle navigation.
External reference signals for autonomous vehicle navigation such as GNSS, LiDAR, camera vision can be easily disrupted, weakened or even spoofed. For example, GNSS does not function underground, in car parks, or tunnels, and is weakened in urban areas due to canyoning effects. Higher performance IMUs, commonly used in the defence and aerospace industries, have limited uptake due to size and cost restraints.
There is a technological need to bring tactical / navigation grade IMU performance to automotive markets to fix weaknesses in external references and improve safety, performance and redundancy, together with a business need for these sensors to be small, cheap and high-volume. This is supported by recommendations from the Automotive Council UK to reduce sensor cost, and by the Zenzic roadmap requirement to deploy high integrity, resilient and redundant sensors by 2028.
Our aim is to release the UK’s first tactical / navigation grade chip-scale IMU for tracking motion which is 100x more sensitive than automotive sensors available today. These sensors are hindered by noise, limiting their use in autonomous navigation.
This is a key step in the development of Autonomous Vehicles and progression towards SAE Autonomy Levels 3 to 5. ZPM IMUs will enable five times longer duration of GNSS-denied navigation, and <0.1% final position error over total distance travelled.
University of the West of England (UWE Bristol) will verify and validate how IMUs sit within the navigation stack of an autonomous vehicle and how safe and resilient they are. This will involve simulation and testing, exposing ZPMs IMUs to different operating conditions, and setting resilience metrics.
WAE Technologies will integrate ZPM’s IMU into inverter modules, providing functional testing in challenging environments: high temperatures, high-g cornering and large accelerations.
In parallel to the technical work plan taking place from July 2023 to March 2025, UWE Bristol and Royal Institute of Navigation (RIN) will organise events one at the start of 2024 and the second in mid 2024, to enable discussion on topics around sensor fusion, safety and resilience with the UK Position, Navigation and Timing community.
This project will accelerate ZPM’s roadmap into the automotive sector bringing to the UK a key strategic sovereign capability.
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Talk to us
To learn more about the CAM Supply Chain UK competition and the remarkable projects that have been awarded, contact competitionsupport@zenzic.io
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