Local Positioning System: Tracking vehicles where GPS fails

The Trusted Transport Positioning System, one of iMOVE’s Impact Extension Program projects, has been completed, and below is an overview of the project and its outcomes.

Background

Satellite positioning such as GPS underpins modern transport, from navigation and fleet tracking to tolling, incident response and connected and automated vehicles. But GPS fails in tunnels, degrades among tall buildings and under overpasses, and can be jammed or spoofed or even disrupted by atmospheric phenomena. When GPS falters, so does the continuity of every service that depends on it.

Road tunnels are a major and widely relevant example. On a return trip through Brisbane’s AirportLinkM7 and Clem7 tunnels, GPS drops out completely for up to five minutes at a time – which can have an impact that is anywhere from annoying, because an exit is missed, to potentially catastrophic, in emergency response situations.

Tunnels are one of the GPS-denied environments where knowing a vehicle’s position, down to which lane it is in, matters most for transit continuity, freight visibility, emergency response and any level of driving automation.

A positioning system that fills the gaps

The Local Positioning System (LPS) is a QUT technology being developed for commercialisation by a team led out of the QUT Centre for Robotics with industry and government advisors and collaborators.

LPS uses compact, low-cost sensors designed to fit on cars, e-scooters or other mobile platforms. A route is mapped once by a vehicle fitted with an LPS sensor. The resulting map can then be used by any vehicle fitted with a compatible LPS sensor for positioning, without the need for beacons or roadside equipment.

The sensors are deliberately privacy-preserving: they are designed to tell places apart but cannot identify people or read number plates which should increase acceptance from regulators, operators and the public. The project also delivered secure telemetry and a live dashboard for following vehicles in real time and replaying journeys.

Results: tunnel accuracy that matches the open road

The LPS sensor was mounted on ZOE2, an instrumented automated research vehicle available through the ARC Training Centre for Automated Vehicles in Rural and Remote Regions (AVR3), headquartered at QUT. ZOE2’s high-grade inertial navigation keeps tracking the vehicle through the tunnel providing a benchmark for evaluating LPS. It was:

• Accurate in the tunnel: In the AirportLinkM7 tunnel, LPS had a median error of 2.6m against ZOE2’s inertial navigation.
• Accurate on open streets: On public roads around QUT’s Kelvin Grove campus, the median error was 2.5m against standard GPS.
• Fills the GPS gaps: On the AirportlinkM7 and Clem7 return trip, LPS provided a continuous position through every GPS dropout, from tunnel entrance to exit.
• Lane-level positioning: In a two-lane section of the AirportlinkM7 tunnel, driven at about 74km/h with no GPS, LPS identified the correct lane around 99% of the time and detected every lane change (6 of 6).

E-scooters and vulnerable road users

Following consultation with TMR (Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads) and RACQ, the project also adapted LPS to track e-scooters, supporting vulnerable road user safety and compliance checks such as scooter parking zones. In trials on a commercial e-scooter at QUT’s Gardens Point campus, 84–100% of LPS positions were within 3m in each test. Beneath an overpass, smartphone GPS recorded at the same time managed only 17–39%. In a parking trial, parked scooters were localised to within 1.3m.

Outcomes and next steps

The project showed that a low-cost, privacy-preserving sensor can provide continuous, lane-level positioning where GPS fails, without requiring additional infrastructure. These results bring LPS closer to transport deployment and are a step toward a sovereign, Australian-made positioning capability that complements GPS.

Tunnels emerged as a promising and compelling application, but the project has also furthered investigation of other transport-related opportunities. Next steps include mapping Brisbane’s full tunnel network, and trialling LPS with road operators, fleet and emergency services and micromobility providers, potentially through the provision of LPS development kits to partners for evaluation.

The results have been presented at ITS Mobility 2026, TMR’s Engineering, Innovation and Technology Forum, a Nature Conference on Autonomous Robotics in South Korea and in a keynote at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2026) in Vienna.

Want to know more?

Find out more at the Local Positioning System website or contact Professor Michael Milford au) to discuss a pilot.