We all experienced that moment of frustration, when the GPS slip and you miss an output on the highway. The team at Tear you haveWhoever builds a low-cost GPS alternative, says this because the current technology is limited by its depending on satellite positioning.
Tern AI says it learned how to locate the position of a vehicle using only mapping information and the existing sensor data of a vehicle. The pitch of the company: It is a cheap system that does not need any extra expensive sensors.
At SHSWThe Austin-based starting proved exclusively for Techcrunch that it could “derive a position out of nothing.”
“No triangulation, no satellites, no WiFi, nothing. We just count where we are traveling, “Brett Harrison, co -founder and president, told Techcrunch while Cyrus Behroozi, a senior developer at Tern, loaded the demo on his iPhone.” This is really a game changing because we move away from triangulation, which limits technology, now we have the ability to be full. “
Harrison says this advance is important for a number of reasons. From a business point of view, companies that depend on GPS-inclusively on horseback programs to delivery companies lose time, money and gas every time their drivers need to double back due to a failure GPS position.
More importantly, our most critical systems such as aviation to disaster response to precise farming depends on GPS. Foreign opponents have already proven that they can Spoof GPS signalswhich could have catastrophic effects both on the economy and national security.
The United States has signaled that it wants to prioritize alternatives to GPS. During his first term, President Donald Trump signed Executive order Reduce trust to a single source of PNT (positioning, navigation and timing) services, such as GPS. Is also Several other initiatives which direct agencies and bodies such as the Defense Department and the National Security Council to ensure resistant PNT by testing and integrating non-GPS technologies.
“Deepseek went out and said it costs $ 6 million to do what it took [OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI companies] Billions to do, “Harrison said.” To get that point to move through a map in a vehicle, it took the government billions of dollars and a few decades. We did it with less than $ 2 million. ”
Tern came out of Furt in February 2024 and announced its $ 4.4 million seeds Months later. This is a quick turn to reach the type of positioning I have experienced this week at SHSW.
Testing the tern system in Austin
To start the demonstration, Behroozi connected his Honda Civic 2019 to his phone with Bluetooth, allowing the TerN application to pull data from the vehicle’s existing sensors. He noted that Tern Techniko can be integrated directly into vehicle models, starting in 2009 and more.
Usually, Tern sets the position manually to speed things up, but for our demo, the team wanted a “cold start.” Fehroozi turned off the local services of his phone, so the TerN intelligent system had only a hidden map of a 500-square-mile boundary around Austin and vehicle sensors to work.
While the car was driving, the system picked up road data to work for “convergence.” It’s been about 10 minutes for the system to achieve a full convergence of a cold start, but Harrison assured me that it usually takes about one to two minutes when it has a starting point. Moreover, we were inserted into some traffic, which slowed things down, Fehroozi added.
Harrison noted that Tern’s system can also locate vehicles in parking garages, tunnels and on mountains, which GPS struggles to do. Harrison would not explain exactly how, saying that the information is “proprietary.”
We went around a few more minutes after the system reached full convergence, and I watched how it constantly tracked our precise movements in a way that appeared as good as, and in some cases better than GPS. This became more evident when we traveled to the center of Austin, where my Google maps regularly misplaced me during the week as I sailed city streets dotted by tall buildings.
Harrison said that Tern’s system is also safer from a privacy perspective because with GPS, “If anyone knows your identifier, they can find you at any time.”
“Our system is a completely closed loop,” he said. “Right now we do not send nothing. It independently derives its own position [via on edge computing]So there are no external touch points. ”
Built to scale
“We set the company and the start of the start to be scalable. If you look at that car Waymo and all the hardware that is embedded, we don’t see that we will go on Nissan Sentra ever soon. It’s just too expensive.” Harrison said, showing before us to us to Waymo-Uber Robotaxi.
“At the manufacturer level, if [Tern] is implemented in the info television system, it’s just software Download, so extraordinarily scalable. All new vehicles have the sensor data we need. The map data already exists with all providers today. So it’s pretty simple. ”
Tern’s potential future customers could be anyone from cars to mobile manufacturers, from Google to Uber. Harrison said the startup is open to grow the company, but also acquisition.
“The main thing is to insert this into the hands of the economy, with the growing threats and the emergence of Te Techniko, which does not notice its full potential due to the limits of triangulation,” Harrison said.
He noted that Tern is investigating possibilities with the government. The launch has recently received a contract award from the US Department of Transportation after a week of displaying its technology along with nine other companies from around the world.
“We hope we have done a good job to show the government what is possible now with US innovation,” Harrison said.
