OSCAR

High volume mass-market receivers are key to opening up the market for precision location services and to helping a number of suppliers move quickly towards volume supply. 

Among the existent gaps, one is the  cooperative navigation assisted by Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) ranging for cooperative navigation. 

Responding to the needs of Premium Mass Market receivers, and to specific markets, the OSCAR project comes into place as a development enabler for a family of advanced Galileo receivers not existing today. The project specifically addressed cooperative navigation for rescue and emergency response services (e.g., firefighting). This sparked from the fact that there are providers of smart solutions for rescue services but a universal solution for positioning in all conditions, for example inside buildings without additional proprietary beacons, does not exist. 

The developed Galileo receiver is designed to work cooperatively from the beginning, with a solution based entirely on the space constellation and thus defining a new GNSS standard.

The goal of the OSCAR project was the development of an open source / open hardware Galileo receiver in a small form factor that is modular and targeted to premium mass market applications that require additional features.

Particular emphasis of the project is on flexibility and modular design: the receiver consists of dedicated components with well defined interfaces.

The receiver is based on a massively parallel microkernel architecture and ready for integration with other sources of information like inertial sensors and ultra-wideband radio for cooperative navigation.

Challenge and technical solution

A standalone open-source / open hardware GNSS/Galileo receiver in a small form factor, which could find its place in practical commercial products, is currently unavailable and challenging to develop. The GNSS/Galileo receiver build in OSCAR addresses the main point as it offers:

• Open-source hardware-based receiver, highly configurable and modifiable, with the possibility to access and visualise various internal data series 
• Advanced signal processing architectures based on vector tracking approach 
• Software-based, real-time hardware architecture
• Multisystem and multicarrier processing
• Robustness against various GNSS attacks