Slashdot Mirror
Super Maps for the 21st Century
Roland Piquepaille writes "After five years of trials, Craig Knoblock and his team at the Information Sciences Institute of the University (ISI) of Southern California, have developed Heracles Maps, an easy-to-use laptop package to optimize routes in the whole world for both military and business travelers. This news release, "A SuperMap for Soldiers -- Or Business Travelers," says that the application integrates various sources of geospatial information, such as satellite imagery of mapping data. From this data, soldiers can easily find a safe route between two locations without being seen or shot from an enemy in another location. this package can easily be adapted to civilian applications, such as a powerful travel planner. You'll find more details and references in this overview."
The travelling salesmen problem is "Find the shortest path which visits every node in the network" (I.E: Find the shortest possible route to visit every city in a given set).
The "shortest path between two nodes" is definately in P, computable by Dijkstra's Shortest Path algorithm, for example.
Yes, but AFAIK, it's actually one of the best understood. Check out the A-Star Search Algorithm, which I think is quite widely used.
I don't know if you have tried using say, Mapquest's. If you have, you might have been in the mood to say "Mapquest is on crack". The directions are a good attempt, but aren't anywhere near effective.
The online direction and mapping tools are indeed lacking but the standalone packages are quite impressive. Garmin's Metroguide is really nice and coupled with a GPS makes travelling in an unfamiliar city much less stressful in my experience. But, I'm the nerdball you see driving down the road with GPS on the dash, a wi-fi antenna stuck to the top all hooked to my laptop honking and whistling in the backseat or in the lap of a passenger.
I have to admit though that the best route planning and mapping software I've used is Microsoft's Streets and Trips. You can update your route with the latest construction areas and request a certain type of road. My sister is going to the beach and I requested all freeways and limited-access highways to cut down on the number of turns and exits she would have to navigate. Streets and Trips gave me a route with one exit not counting the final destination. Not bad for a ~400 mile trip. I personally took a similar trip two weeks ago and opted for the shortest route instead of the simplest and it worked like a champ.
The net effect is that if you follow automated directions the trip time will mostly be far longer than if a person familiar with local conditions selects the route.
No argument there but unfortunately that's not always feasible.
Beside which, topography is modeled but the ground cover isn't.
For this reason you can't solely rely on topo maps. The TerraServer has aerial photos down to 1 meter resolution. That's not going to cut it for the military but for you and me that's plenty. Besides, the military uses aerial and satellite imagery that is much higher resolution than anything available to civilians. For better or worse that's the way it is.
Semi ontopic: for some cool Win32 software to let you play around with aerial photos and eat up some of Microsoft's bandwidth at the same time :) check out USAPhotoMaps, it's free as in beer. I picked up TopoFusion not too long ago and love it. It's not free but it's worth the $40 I put into it. It lets me pull down imagery from the TerraServer site and overlay it with topo maps. It also has a neat feature that syncs digital photos with waypoints you've set in your GPS and will spit out a web page with clickable icons at each waypoint that is quite nice. Oh, and it lets you download elevation information and generate 3D maps of an area. Neato! I haven't played with much GPS software outside the Win32 domain but I'll be researching that as soon as i re-partion my Thinkpad for a dual-boot.
Well, I can say with some surety that this system would never be permitted for use in the US military for these reasons, as well as a few others. Nothing will obviate good reconnaissance.
True, but good reconnaissance sometimes includes nothing more than a satellite image of an area. This info could be (maybe it is?) updated realtime on a notebook in the field via uplink. Admittedly I know very little about how our military operates outside of the world of Tom Clancy novels :) But this looks neat as hell for civilians at least.
You've got an easy breezy wind at your back...most of the time.
A projection transformation doesn't take that much CPU power. I did projection transformations on huge datasets, and it only takes a few seconds on an old trusted P2. It's just simple math really.
The military already uses similar software. The various functions like getting to point A to point B without being shot are just used as tools by an analyst to help develop courses of action. Arcview is a similar product available to civilians. The only thing that is new with supermaps is that it appears that is has all the images/maps/data precompiled so that you don't have to hunt stuff down from NGA, formally NIMA.