One of the goals of the ARIADNA project is to raise awareness about the technological enhancements of Galileo. Luckily, there are many fellow EUSPA projects supporting this objective: they are developing, analysing or demonstrating the benefits of EGNSS in different applications and contexts. We are happy to share with you some of them!

Up next is the GAMMS project, which stands for Galileo/GNSS-Based Autonomous Mobile Mapping System. Funded by the EUSPA, the project kicked off in July 2021 and will run until December 2023. It is coordinated by GEOSAT and counts eight partners.

In short, GAMMS enables the exploitation of space data for surveying and mapping. The main objective is to develop an autonomous terrestrial mobile mapping system (AMMS), based on the tight integration of autonomous vehicle (AV), navigation/geodetic including Galileo, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. More specifically, GAMMS is developing:

  • a mapping robot for geodata acquisition
  • an AI-based highly automated mapping software to produce High Definition (HD) maps from the MMS remote sensing data.

Robots mapping for robots

The future of mapping is robotic mapping, where robotics, cartography and navigation/geodesy meet. In the long term, GAMMS envisions fleets of low-cost, autonomous, electrically powered, mobile mapping systems (MMS) collecting geodata in a massive, continuous yet inconspicuous way to produce HD maps.

GAMMS also envisions AI as a core component of HD map processing engine to deal with huge loads of geo-data, collected daily/weekly and worldwide. In other words, robots mapping for robots.

More specifically, GAMMS aims at developing an advanced prototype (TRL 6 to 7) of an autonomous terrestrial mobile mapping system –a mapping robot– based on an already existing Level of Automation 4 (LoA-41) AV for cm-level accurate and certifiable mapping to serve the needs of HD maps for autonomous vehicles. GAMMS’ result is the production of high-definition, multi-purpose and accurate maps in a much faster and cheaper way than today.

Quote: “Galileo will make the difference in High Definition maps. Thanks to its services, GAMMS will provide faster, cheaper, and more accurate HD maps.” – Annarita Leserri, Communications and EU Project Manager at ENIDE

The GAMMS Preliminary Design Review

Currently, work within GAMMS is already well underway. The eight European partners met online on the Preliminary Design Review (PDR) of GAMMS on 4 October 2021, which can be seen as one of the first project milestones. Partners and EUSPA experts met to review the first achievements, ongoing tasks, and next steps in the project.

Furthermore, the GAMMS partners engaged in a technical discussion focused on the complete system architecture within WP (Work Package) 3 “High-level system architecture”, led by Sensible 4, an autonomous driving software company. The goal of this WP is the definition of the high-level AMMS system architecture (hardware and software) and its documentation in the corresponding Architecture Design Document (ADD). This WP serves as a harmonisation/coordination effort between individual technical developments.

For more info on the GAMMS project, keep an eye on the project website, Twitter and LinkedIn.