We have all experienced that moment of frustration when the GPS looks at and you miss a highway. The team in Tern he, who is building a low -cost GPS alternative, says this is because current technology is limited by its belief in satellite positioning.
Tern he says he has understood how to locate the position of a vehicle using only information about the existing map and data of a vehicle’s sensor. Company Field: It is a free system that requires no extra expensive sensors.
In SXSW, Austin -based starting demonstrated exclusively to Techcrunch that it could “bring one position out of nothing”.
“No triangle, without satellites, without Wi-Fi, nothing. We simply understand where we are while driving,” Brett Harrison, co-founder and president, told Techcrunch while Cyrus Behroozi, a senior software developer in Tern, loaded the demonstration on his iPhone. “This is really changing the game because as we move away from the based triangle, which limits technology, we now have the ability to be completely out of that network.”
Harrison says this progress is important for a number of reasons. Commercially, companies that rely on GPS-including travel greeting applications for delivery companies-lose time, money and gas whenever their executives must double because of the wrong positioning of the GPS.
Most importantly, our most critical systems – from aviation to disaster response to precision agriculture – rely on GPS. Foreign opponents have already demonstrated that they can destroy GPS signals, which can have catastrophic impacts on both the economy and national security.
SH.BA has signaled that it wants to prioritize GPS alternatives. During his first term, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to reduce confidence in a single source of PNT services (positioning, navigation and time), like GPS. There are also some other initiatives that run agencies and bodies such as the Defense Department and the National Security Council to provide elastic PNT by testing and integrating non-GPS technologies.
“Deepseek came out and said it cost $ 6 million to do what it took (Openai, Anthropic and other companies of it) billions to do, “Harrison said. We did it with less than $ 2 million. “
Tern came out of the theft in February 2024 and announced about $ 4.4 million in the round of a few months later. This is a quick turn to achieve the type of positioning I experienced this week at SXSW.
TERN SYSTEM TESTING IN AUSTIN
To begin the demonstration, Behroozi connected his Honda Civic for 2019 to his phone through Bluetooth, allowing the Tern app to withdraw data from existing vehicle sensors. He noted that Tern technology can be directly integrated into vehicles, starting the 2009 and above model years.
Usually, Tern puts the position manually to speed up things, but for our demonstration, the team wanted a “cold start”. Behroozi Fiki’s location services services, so Tern’s intelligent system had only a stored map of a 500 -square -foot border around Austin and vehicle sensors to work with it.
As the car drove, the system received road data to work towards “convergence”. It took about 10 minutes for the system to reach the full convergence from a cold start because, according to Behroozi, there was traffic, so our movements were limited. Harrison provided me convergence usually lasts one to two minutes without a starting point, and is immediate with one.
Harrison noted that the tern system can also locate vehicles in parking garages, tunnels and mountains, which GPS struggles to do. Harrison would not explain exactly how, to say that the information is “owner”.
We traveled for a few minutes after the system reached the full convergence, and I looked as it continuously tracked our correct movements in a way that looked just as good as, and in some cases better than GPS. This became more visible when we downtown Austin, where my Google maps were regularly mistaken all week as I sailed on urban roads painted with wonderful buildings.
Harrison said the tern system is also safer from a perspective of intimacy because with GPS, “If someone knows your ID, they can find you at any time.”
“Our system is a total closed loop,” he said. “For now, we’re not letting go of anything. It is’ it is independently extracting its position (via computing on edge), so there are no external touch points.”
Built to scaling
“We set the company and the solution from the beginning to be scaled. If you look at that Waymo car and the entire device that is embedded, we do not see that going to a Nissan Sentra at any time soon. It is just very expensive, ”Harrison said, pointing to us about a Waymo-Ober robotax.
“At the manufacturer’s level, if (tern) applied within the infotainment system, is simply a software Download, so extremely escalating. All new vehicles have the sensor data we need. Map data already exist with all providers today. So it’s quite simple. ”
Possible future customers of Tern can be any of the automobiles to mobile phone manufacturers, from Google to Uber. Harrison said the beginning is open to the growth of the company, but also a purchase.
“The main thing is to get this into the hands of the economy, with the growing threats and the emergence of technology that is not realizing its full potential due to the boundaries of triangle,” Harrison said.
He noted that Tern is exploring opportunities with the government. The start recently received a contract price from the US Transport Department after a week of demonstrating its technology along with nine other companies from around the world.
“We hope we’ve done a good job to tell the government what is possible now with the American innovation,” Harrison said.
Clarification: This article was updated to clarify how long Tern claims that its system usually receives to achieve full convergence.
