Applications

While the unmanned vehicle market spans across unmanned aerial (UAV), ground (UGV), and surface (USV) vehicles, non‑industrial robots, robotic lawnmowers, and autonomous robotic tractors, u-blox focus on three main application areas: UAVs, heavy machines, and small ground robotics.

UAVs / drones

• Commercial UAV: mapping and inspection applications offering accurate trajectories and geo-tagging in order to increase the productivity of data collection and processing. The cost, size, and power consumption of existing solutions provide a serious strain on UAV design, which means high precision technology is generally sold as an add-on rather than being deployed “en masse.”
  
   
• Delivery UAV: companies want to reduce the cost of the last mile of delivery to increase the speed, frequency, and efficiency of online retail of small goods. This requires enabling safe navigation from point A to point B without human intervention.

Heavy machines

• Agriculture and Machine Control: heavy machine equipment manufacturers use expensive high precision technology to autonomously steer or guide heavy vehicles in order to increase the productivity of key tasks, saving the end user time and money. Market adoption has up till now been limited due to the high cost of existing solutions, as positive return on investment for the end user has been possible for large scale operations.

Small ground robotics

• Vacuum cleaners: full automation of vacuuming inside the home has been fueled by the availability of secure short range radio technologies offering remote control and telematics possibilities.
• Lawn mowers: full automation of lawn mowers use wireless connectivity in combination with high precision GNSS to get rid of wires and the need for human intervention. In addition, standard precision GNSS, combined with wireless connectivity, is already being used for anti-theft and security features.
• Delivery: similar to the Delivery UAV scenario outlined above, companies want to increase productivity and efficiency with ground deliveries that are large, such as groceries.