The low -cost GPS alternative to Tern AI actually works

We have all experienced this moment of powerlessness when GPS runs out and miss a way out on the highway. The team of The tear you haveWho builds an alternative with low -cost GPS says this is because this technology is limited by reading it on satellite positioning.

Tern AI says he has figured out how to find a vehicle position using only card information and existing vehicle sensory data. The terrain of the company: This is a cheap system that does not require additional expensive sensors.

In SXSWLaunched, based in Austin, demonstrates exclusively for TechCrunch that it can “get a position out of nothing”.

“No triangulation, no satellites, no wifi, nothing. We just find out where we are while we drive, “Brett Harrison, co -founder and president, told TechCrunch, while Cyrus Behrozi, a senior software developer at Tern, loaded the demonstration on his iPhone. “This really changes the game, because as we move away from the base of the triangulation that restricts the technology, we now have the opportunity to be entirely from this network.”

Harrison says this breakthrough is important for a number of reasons. From a commercial point of view, companies that rely on personal doctors-initiative applications for driving delivery companies are time, money and gas every time their drivers need to double back due to the defective GPS positioning.

More importantly, our most critical systems such as aviation to the disaster response to precision agriculture rely on GPS. Foreign opponents have already demonstrated that they can Spoof GPS signalsWhich could have catastrophic impacts on both the economy and national security.

The US has signaled that it wants to prioritize GPS alternatives. During his first term, President Donald Trump signed Enforcement order To reduce the reading of a source of PNT services (positioning, navigation and time) such as GPSS There are and there are several other initiatives which direct agencies and bodies such as the Ministry of Defense and the National Security Council to provide sustainable PNT by testing and integrating non-GPS technologies.

“Deepseek came out and said it cost $ 6 million to do what is needed (Openai, Anthropic and other AI companies) billions to do, “Harrison said. “To get this point to move to a real -time card to a vehicle, the government took billions of dollars and several decades. We did it at less than $ 2 million. “

Tarn came out of stealth in February 2024 and announced his $ 4.4 million round A few months later. This is a quick turn to achieve the type of positioning I experienced this week at SXSW.

TERN system testing in Austin

To start the demonstration, Behroozi linked its Honda Civic to 2019 to its phone via Bluetooth, allowing the Tern app to download data from existing car sensors. He noted that Tern technology can be integrated directly into vehicles, initial model years 2009 and up.

Usually tern sets the position manually to speed up things, but for our demonstration the team wanted a “cold start”. FEHROZI turned off its location services on its phone, so the Tern intelligent system had only a cache map of a border of 500 square miles around Austin’s sensors and the vehicle to operate.

While the car collided, the system raised road data to work for “convergence”. It took approximately 10 minutes to allow the system to reach a full convergence of cold start, but Harrison assured me that it usually took about one to two minutes when there was a starting point. Plus, we were stuck in a little traffic, which slowed things down, Fehos added.

Harrison noted that the Tern system could also locate vehicles in parking garages, tunnels and in the mountains that GPS struggles to do. Harrison would not explain exactly how, saying the information was “own”.

We toured a few more minutes after the system reached full convergence and watched it constantly track our exact movements in a way that looked so good, and in some cases better than GPS. This became more clear when we entered the center of Austin, where my Google Maps regularly misled me all week as I used to go around the city streets full of towering buildings.

Harrison said the Tern system is also more fucked in terms of confidentiality, because with GPS: “If anyone knows your ID, he can find you at any time.”

“Our system is a total closed cycle,” he said. “We are not broadcasting anything right now. It independently derives its own position (via Edge Computing) so there are no external points of contact. “

Scaled

“We created the company and the decision from the outset to be a scalable. If you look at this Waymo car and all the hardware that is built -in, we don’t see that it will soon go to Nissan Sentra. It’s just too expensive. Harrison said, pointing to us at Waymo -be Robotaxi.

“At a manufacturer level if (Tern) is implemented within the framework of the information and entertainment system, it’s just software Download, so extremely scale. All new vehicles have the necessary data from the sensor. The card details already exist with all providers today. So it’s quite simple. “

Potential future TERN customers can be any car manufacturers to mobile phone manufacturers from Google to Uber. Harrison said the launch was open to growing the company, but also an acquisition.

“The main thing is to extract this in the hands of the economy, with the increasing threats and the emergence of technologies that do not realize their full potential due to the boundaries of triangulation,” Harrison said.

He noted that Tern is exploring the opportunities with the government. The launch recently received a contract award from the US Department of Transport after a week of demonstrating its technology with nine other companies around the world.

“We hope that we have done a good job to show the government what is possible now with American innovations,” Harrison said.