Hi everyone,

This is Colin Beighley from Swift Navigation and I just wanted to post a quick and shameless plug for our project on Kickstarter called Piksi. I believe it was mentioned by someone here a few weeks ago in a blog post, but we never got around to properly introducing ourselves. The campaign has just over a day left as of this posting, and it's been wildly more successful than we had ever dreamed! I wanted to make sure you guys had a chance to see it before it's over.

Piksi is a low cost, highly accurate GPS receiver targeted at use in autonomous systems. It uses a technique called RTK to reduce the position error from several meters (with a regular GPS receiver) down to a few centimeters.

We believe this level of localization accuracy is a key enabling technology for lots of UAV applications. Think autonomous takeoff and landing, highly dynamic / precise outdoor flightpaths (like an outdoor Vicon!), GPS-based attitude determination, and more. However, currently a GPS system with these capabilities costs close to $10,000, far too expensive for most hobbyist and civilian applications. We've reduced that price by 10 times, hopefully making this technology accessible to many more people.

Piksi is also an open platform. The software, schematics and PCB layout are all open source. This makes it a great tool for learning about GPS, implementing clever new positioning algorithms and easing systems integration.

We are really excited to see what the people in the DIYDrones community will come up with. Putting powerful tools in the hands of such a creative group of people will surely lead to magical things!

If you have any questions, feel free to respond here or email us at info@swift-nav.com. Please spread word about the campaign!

Thanks,

Colin

Co-Founder, Swift Navigation Inc