AAVI recently caught up with Xavier Banqué, strategic marketing manager at Trimble, to talk about the key trends driving location technologies, in a feature first published in the April 2026 issue.
Please can you introduce yourself to our readers?
Originally educated as a telecommunications engineer, I have a dual professional profile – covering both technical and business – resulting from a 20-year career that was focused on technical positions during the first decade before I transitioned to become a business strategist in the last 10 years, when I spearheaded a GNSS software company [Rokubun] as CEO and founder. My responsibility as strategic marketing manager for automotive at Trimble is to make sure the company provides the necessary satellite navigation technology to enable the L3 and beyond autonomy roadmap.
What challenges are you trying to solve?
There is currently a debate in the industry about whether autonomous vehicles have to rely on relative location technologies (lidar, camera, radar, etc) or on absolute location technology (GNSS) – but I think this is meaningless. Autonomous vehicles will have to leverage the right combination of both those technologies to have powerful enough physical AI solutions to arrive at full autonomy. Educating the relevant stakeholders about this is one of my biggest challenges. Another challenge we are working on is enhancing the robustness
of the GNSS solution we provide, as the necessary response to the increase in jamming and/or spoofing events designed to disrupt GNSS nominal operations..
How can fusing GNSS with inertial navigation (dead reckoning) help?
GNSS+INS fusion is of principal importance not only in complex city environments but also in many other challenging GNSS scenarios (under canopy, etc) that result in outages, multipath or reduced satellite visibility. GNSS and inertial navigation systems (INS), like IMU, wheel odometry, etc, do complement each other to offer a more accurate always-available location solution. The symbiotic relationship between GNSS and inertial navigation is based on using the good-quality GNSS outcome to keep the INS finely tuned so that when GNSS struggles, the navigation solution can rely on INS to still provide accurate navigation.
What is the OEM business case for investing in ‘always-on’ navigation?
Navigation is a cornerstone technology in the modern automotive paradigm that enables business opportunities in different areas of the vehicle. If we think about in-vehicle solutions, such as navigation, Trimble’s centimeter-precise navigation can enable a premium driver’s experience, such as being guided on which lane to drive in so as to never miss the correct turn. The same technology can also be used in ADAS solutions, enabling, for example, lane departure assistance or – in the near future – connected and cooperative advanced features, such as automatic traffic management on a highway, according to the number of vehicles in each lane. Always-on satellite navigation results in very attractive ROI since it can be leveraged in many different vehicle and mobility value propositions.
Can you give an example of how you have helped an OEM?
Trimble recently announced that Lucid Gravity vehicles will be powered by our most advanced GNSS and sensor fusion solution. Our most recent solution focuses not only on accurate navigation but also on robustness and integrity so that navigation data can be trusted by new ADAS or autonomous driving solutions.
What innovations could result in even greater positioning accuracy?
Certainly, GNSS alone is not enough to provide the reliable, accurate and robust absolute location solutions across all scenarios (inside, for example) necessary for the uptake of autonomy. In addition to the current state-of-the-art GNSS+INS, the future of navigation solutions will have to go further in tightly hybridizing with multiple sensors and radio technologies, such as vision-based sensors, ultra-wideband (UWB) and low Earth orbit position navigation and timing (LEO-PNT). This will result in a multisource navigation technology able to provide an all-time, all-scenario, precise absolute location.
This article was first published in the April 2026 issue of ADAS & Autonomous Vehicle International. Subscribe to receive future issues here