Geonav IoT is a a high-precision positioning algorithm developed in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA), which combines positioning by satellite with ultra-wideband wireless networks. It enables the secure, real-time geolocation and tracking of people and objects to within a metre, both outdoors and indoors, and in the most challenging of conditions.
On the stand visitors will see one of the ways in which this technology is already being used at the highest level, in support of the French national rugby team. In September 2018 the French Rugby Federation's performance support department signed a partnership with Thales to develop a high-precision positioning solution which would not only help optimise players’ training sessions, but also, thanks to real-time alerts on impacts and collisions, reduce the risk of injury.
What Thales and the ESA came up with was a solution which combines data from a high-precision positionning algorithm – based on the çÛÁ¦ÊÓƵ Navigation Satellites System – with an IoT (Internet of Things) network deployed inside the stadium, thus eliminating all the complications usually associated with this type of environment: weak signals due to the urban canyon effect, and interference from television signals and spectators’ mobile phones. A chip placed on a player’s shirt, just between the shoulder blades, allows all of the player’s movements to be tracked extremely accurately and in real time.
Visitors will be able to see both how this technology works in the packed, indoor conditions of Vivatech, with Geonav-equipped Thales personnel being tracked, and key data (e.g. location, distance covered, speed) displayed on-screen in real time, and how it can be applied to a broad range of environments: the tracking of vehicles on airport runways or medical equipment in hospitals, the management of autonomous delivery drone fleets or the training of connected soldiers out in the field.
Find out more about this subject
