Achieving Centimetre-level Positioning Accuracy in Urban Canyons with Locata Technology

In 2005 The UK Department for Trade and Industry (DTI) commenced funding a project called Visualising Integrated Information on Buried Assets to Reduce Streetworks (VISTA). The project aims to precisely map buried assets (gas pipes, telecom cables, etc) and increase the efficiency of the process in challenging environments such as in urban canyons, where GPS fails to work or is not reliable enough to get a precise position. In this context the Institute of Engineering Surveying and Space Geodesy (IESSG) at the University of Nottingham purchased, at the beginning of 2007, a terrestrial network positioning system called Locata technology. This technology is developed by Locata Corporation Pty Ltd from Australia. Over the last five months researchers have carried out experiments with this new technology on the main campus of the University of Nottingham. The preliminary results show that LocataLites are a suitable technology to solve the positioning problems for the VISTA project. The overall accuracy is at the centimetre level for all points surveyed. Moreover, we underline in this paper the reliability and the flexibility of this new technology.