Koherent locates with radio waves.
On its website, the Vantaa-based company Koherent states that its positioning technology is more extreme than rocket science. It’s a bold claim, but it’s well-founded: the company’s founder, CEO, and chairman of the board, Kari Leppänen, started his career in radio astronomy.
“I spent a few years in New Mexico, USA, conducting radio astronomy research on long-distance interferometry. We made images of quasars using VLBI (Very-long Baseline Interferometry) technology,” says Leppänen.
His career then took him to Nokia and later Huawei. When 5G development started talking about positioning accuracy within half a meter at distances of hundreds of meters, it sounded modest to Leppänen, and he believed he could do better.
“With VLBI technology, we could measure the location of radio telescopes with millimeter precision over thousands of kilometers. So, I started simulating positioning with Matlab on my home computer in the evenings.”
When Leppänen became confident in the method's functionality, he ventured into entrepreneurship.
“My sons joined the company. With my younger son, we bought two software radio cards. We coded an algorithm that allowed us to measure the distance between them on a 5 GHz Wi-Fi frequency with sub-millimeter accuracy from the kitchen table. That’s how the whole thing got started.”
Koherent’s subcontractor estimated it would take six months to build hardware suitable for positioning. It took three years, but now Koherent has a positioning system that it believes is the most accurate in the world. At distances of hundreds of meters, the technology can achieve an accuracy of 0.1 millimeters in optimal conditions, and even in poor conditions, accuracy remains under one centimeter. It can be used, for instance, for positioning self-moving industrial machinery.
“For example, container crane positioning at a port works by placing our antennas on the port's light masts and container cranes. The masts are higher than the container stacks, so ensuring line-of-sight visibility is easy.”
In the future, the solution can be developed to utilize signal reflections so a temporary loss of line-of-sight visibility won’t cause problems.
Another use case is structural health monitoring, i.e., measuring the movements of structures.
“In the summer of 2023, we installed the system on a fairly large bridge in Finland and measured its behavior. We are now also progressing towards the first pilots in machine positioning.”
The first commercial solutions are expected to be ready in 2024.
Translated from original article in Tekniikka&Talous