For rideshare companies, even occasional small GPS errors can add up to big risks when compounded over millions of rides per day. A passenger matching with a “nearest driver” who would need to quickly cross four lanes of traffic to exit the freeway causes inaccurate ETAs and unnecessary recalculations. Navigation systems that can’t account for lane-level traffic patterns may not suggest the most efficient route, adding extra minutes to the ride.
Grab, Southeast Asia’s leading superapp for mobility, deliveries, and digital financial services, partnered with Swift Navigation to improve the accuracy and efficiency of the navigation experience for its drivers.
The Challenge: Urban Environments Degrade Accuracy
Standard GPS accuracy degrades sharply in dense, high-rise cities. In Singapore’s Central Business District, signal reflections off tall buildings and multi-level roads can push positioning error above 20 meters, making it harder for drivers to navigate to pick-up points, and harder for Grab to generate reliable ETAs for riders and customers.
Underground and covered areas — basements, carparks, and covered walkways — compound the problem. These GPS-constrained areas require dead reckoning algorithms that depend on a reliable last known GPS position to maintain accuracy.
To make matters worse, most rideshare drivers depend solely on their mobile phone for navigation, and precise GPS is not yet a widely available feature in consumer devices.
The Solution: A Complete Precision Stack
Grab assembled a best-of-breed technology stack to solve the problem at the hardware, chipset, and correction-signal layers simultaneously:
Device: OPPO contributed its Find N5 foldable phone, a leading edge mass market device with dual frequency hardware.
Chipset: Qualcomm Technologies activated Meter-Level Positioning on the Snapdragon 8 Elite Mobile Platform inside the Find N5, enabling the phone to consume real-time correction data.
Corrections: Swift Navigation supplied its SkylarkTM Precise Positioning Service, a cloud-based service that uses advanced atmospheric modeling to improve the accuracy of GPS from several meters down to less than one.
Together, the stack delivers 10x greater positioning accuracy than standard GPS and marks Southeast Asia’s first deployment of high-accuracy GPS positioning integrated directly into a mobile app.
As part of its pilot program in Singapore, Grab also used their KartaCam devices and LiDAR to map basements and carparks around the Marina Bay area to enable precise navigation handoffs as drivers entered and exited GPS-constrained areas.
The Results: A Better Driver Experience
Nearly 250 drivers participated in the pilot program. There’s no setup process or learning curve for the drivers. When they access the Grab Driver App from their OPPO Find N5 phone and use GrabMaps for navigation, the app seamlessly receives high accuracy location.
These drivers reported noticeably improved positioning in urban areas like the central business district, with faster, more confident navigation to pick-up points.
“With this pilot, the location accuracy feels much sharper, more stable, and navigation updates happen almost instantaneously.”
As Grab continues to expand device coverage and add new markets, Swift Navigation remains a core infrastructure partner, providing the correction signal layer that lets Grab’s hardware and software teams focus on building great experiences on top of dependable, centimeter-accurate positioning.