GNSS micromobility white paper
How an integrated positioning platform helps micromobility operators meet rising regulatory, safety and compliance demands
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A positioning platform which integrates multi-band GNSS, dead reckoning, and RTK delivers the precision micromobility fleets need
City authorities are tightening rules for shared micromobility deployments such as e-scooters and e-bikes. Dedicated parking bays, restricted riding zones, and dynamic speed limits are becoming standard. Operators now have to prove compliance to retain licences. Madrid for instance has withdrawn operating licences, and Brussels has cut its pool of approved operators to three. For micromobility fleet operators, knowing exactly where a vehicle is, and proving it, has become a condition of doing business.
Achieving the level of precision micromobility requires starts with reliable GNSS, and conventional GNSS struggles in dense city environments. Signal reflections and blocked satellite views are common in built-up areas. Accuracy can fall from 2–5 meters in open sky to 10–50 meters in dense urban canyons, where many shared vehicles operate. Every meter of error carries a cost, too. Think rejected end-of-ride events, disputed parking fines, support tickets, and retrieval trips that erode margins. Operators who can prove precise, compliant positioning win city contracts, and the ones who can’t risk losing them.
No single technology can provide reliable positioning in every urban scenario. Instead, accurate and continuous positioning relies on combining complementary technologies, each addressing a different challenge. Together, they form a layered sensing architecture capable of delivering robust, sub-meter performance for micromobility applications.
Because single sensors cannot be guaranteed to hold up on their own, Quectel has developed an integrated GNSS micromobility positioning platform that fuses four on-vehicle inputs into a single system. Multi-band GNSS forms the foundation, with the added L5 frequency cutting through multipath to halve positioning error. Dead reckoning draws on the onboard IMU and wheel-speed pulses to maintain continuous tracking through tunnels and underground parking. RTK, meanwhile, delivers centimeter-level correction whenever satellite lock and a live correction stream are available. Wheel-tick data completes the picture, supplying a constant, GNSS-independent motion signal.
Crucially, these inputs don’t simply run in sequence. A sensor fusion engine scores each one’s confidence in real time and blends them into a single, stable position estimate. That means a vehicle can move from open sky to urban canyon to underground parking without gaps in location data. Rather than switching abruptly between technologies, it simply adapts as conditions change. The result is continuous, reliable positioning across exactly the environments in which shared micromobility vehicles operate.
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To see how the platform performs outside the lab, we ran field tests on an e-scooter covering boulevards, dense urban canyons, and underground parking. Several sensor configurations were then benchmarked side by side against a high-precision reference system, precise to within centimeters in open sky and decimeters even in GNSS-challenged conditions, so the results reflect genuine GNSS micromobility field accuracy rather than a simulated one.
Testing produced clear results. Dead reckoning keeps the platform tracking reliably through underground parking and cuts urban-canyon error by more than two thirds compared with GNSS alone. RTK then pushes accuracy even further, down to sub-meter levels in open sky. Results like these are underpinned by Quectel’s complete positioning toolkit of multi-band, RTK and dead reckoning-enabled GNSS modules, plus precision antennas. Read the white paper for the full breakdown.