ISLET - Galileo HAS enabled Maritime receiver

While GNSS enables many applications across multiple industries, the standalone accuracy provided is often not sufficient for professional applications and for this reason, in order to address the high-accuracy needs in these markets, the European Commission proposed the provisioning of a High Accuracy Service (HAS) through the Galileo programme, the European GNSS.

With Galileo HAS, Galileo is the first constellation able to provide a high-accuracy PPP service globally directly through the Signal in Space. Typically, high-accuracy services are based on the provision of accurate satellite data (clocks, orbits and biases) and atmospheric data (mainly ionospheric and tropospheric corrections) on a regional level.

For Maritime and Inland Waterways (IWW) navigation, different applications are demanding High-Accuracy (sub-meter) PNT solutions, as identified in the EUSPA UCP Report on Maritime, Inland Waterways, Fisheries and Aquaculture User Needs as well as in IMO Resolution 915. For this purpose, there are solutions already in use, for instance RTK, radio beacons DGPS, EGNOS and satellite private corrections. However, these technologies show certain challenges such as coverage, performance and costs.

In this context, the ISLET project has been conceived to take advantage of Galileo HAS added values for the Maritime and IWW markets, including almost worldwide coverage, centimetric horizontal accuracy, and a free of charge use. The project outcome is a complete, close-to-market shipborne integrated equipment with Galileo HAS, multi-frequency and multi constellation capabilities, and OSNMA.

The primary goal of the ISLET project is the integration of the user-level Galileo High Accuracy algorithm in a Maritime GNSS Receiver. More specifically, the objective of ISLET is to Design, Develop, Test and Demonstrate a GNSS positioning/navigation close-to-market solution, integrating Galileo HAS, suitable to be embedded within the vessel navigation equipment for Maritime and IWW operations.

The project will identify target applications and provide significant use cases to demonstrate Galileo HAS capabilities through campaign executions in real environment, showing the advantages of this service. Moreover, detailed strategic and business plans will be developed to consider the transition from the developed prototype to a marketable product.

Challenge & technical solution

To develop the Galileo HAS enabled solution hardware and software, including two different operational modes for two types of applications with different accuracy requirements, and considering its integration in different platforms.

The developed receiver will implement the required algorithms to process Galileo HAS and also Galileo OSNMA according to the specifications set by the Programme Reference Documents for this service. The receiver will ease the introduction of Galileo HAS in Maritime and IWW standards, and continue the promotion of the Resilient PNT concept started in ASGARD.