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Valorisation

‘We are experts in time distribution’, says Marco Gorter, has fibre infrastructure along all motorways.’ Although the
co-founder and Chief Operations Officer at OPNT. ‘And TU project will officially end next year, all project partners want
Delft is particularly good at wirelessly sending the signal.’ to continue to further develop the technology. Gorter: ‘I’m
The company developed a time distribution system based convinced that we will be able to distinguish ourselves with
on the universal UTC traceable time. Gorter: ‘Many vital this technology worldwide and that the major car brands
infrastructures, like telecommunications, the financial sector will show interest.’
and the energy sector, depend on accurate timing using GPS,
but you could jam or spoof those signals. For example, finan-
cial transactions cannot take place without a UTC traceable
timestamp, and spoofing power plants with a false timing
reference can lead to black outs, when power plants start SUPER GPS
to drift in phase in relation to the rest of the energy grid. For
these markets, we have developed a terrestrial timing service, Project name: SuperGPS: Accurate timing
which we operate via fibre optics.’ The next step, however, and positioning through an optical-wireless
is making this timing service wireless. This is where the distributed time and frequency reference
SuperGPS project comes in. Apart from car navigation, it
Participating institutes: TU Delft
‘I once did a position calculation with (and VU Amsterdam in the initial phase)
a simple receiver near a skyscraper.
It was hundreds of meters off’ Principal researchers: Christian Tiberius, PhD,
Associate Professor Geoscience and Remote
Sensing at TU Delft, and Gerard Jansen, PhD,
could also serve as a very accurate navigation for people in Associate Professor Circuits and Systems at
buildings such as hospitals, shopping centres or supermar- TU Delft
kets, or to locate people who have made an emergency call.
If the trial at The Green Village yields good results, then Duration: 1 November 2016 - 30 April 2021
as far as Tiberius is concerned, the next step is to test the Funding: NWO Open Technology Programme
equipment near a main road. ‘Autonomous driving is seen Partners: KPN, VSL, Fugro and OPNT
as the most important application. That will probably first Budget: € 1.3 million
happen on main roads. And the Netherlands already

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