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Ground-Based GPS Mimic Is Inch Perfect
holy_calamity writes "For several years the U.S. Air Force has used WiFi-router-sized boxes on a New Mexico missile range to create a GPS-like service to track munitions to the nearest inch. Now the Australian company behind the technology is rolling it out for civilians. One gold mine is already using the tech and specifications are being released so that GPS receiver manufacturers can adopt the technology. Locata hopes that construction sites, factories and city governments will all want to install their own high accuracy 'location hotspots.'"
Ought to be around here somewhere?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
just wondering if its possible to do this with open source.
Is this cheaper than professional GPS systems from Trimble? I thought they already had acurracies like this.
Wasn't this like a system they used before GPS that was still in minimal use until recently?
I vaguely remember they still had PDP-8's still in storage as replacement parts
When people ask if I'm an optimist, I say "I hope so". --Bill Bailey
I wonder how long it will take before this becomes available for use in cellphones to improve the accuracy of tracking. It would make services like 'find my iphone' even better, but would also enable government agencies and stalkers to get an even better lock on those they're tracking.
Which has been developed and used for the last 20 years. What is new here? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_GPS
TFA doesn't go into details, but I'm imagining a replacement for mo-cap and wiimote/kinect if it updates quickly enough, is small enough, and cheap.
Something tells me that an Australian company would not be using inches to track anything. TFA seems to agree. Our official conversion tables between metric and "ye olde worlde" include the phrase "an inch is as good as a mile", which does not bode well for its accuracy.
Doesn't the military use metric (klicks = km), along with every other industry that needs a sane measurement system?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Its called differential GPS and is already being used all over the world. Hell its even being used on farms to guide tractors by now. It can get down to the cm level of accuracy. Not News.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_GPS
http://www.deere.com/servlet/ProdCatProduct?pNbr=GT3TAPC&tM=FR
GPS was a project of the Department of Defense, where money grows on trees. That's why it's still there and being maintained.
Meanwhile, civilian administrations (read "Department of Transportation") only have finite funds to spend on implementing and maintaining a ground-based system (read "eLORAN").
Because a ground-based system can only be used to bomb ourselves, it won't get much money, especially in today's economy. Don't expect such systems to be deployed outside specific buildings and such, as alluded to in the summary.
Wow Amazing. I don't know have idea when tehcnology used in military well
with WiFi APs/Cell Towers/MAC addresses.
Can anyone name any other technologies that were originally developed by the military which are in common use by private citizens today?
Millimeter accuracy in 3 dimensions would open up a lot of possibilities for use in robotics.
Now we just need to get our enemies to buy a whole bunch of these, and conveniently place them on all the nice targets we'd like to bomb.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
Slashdot editors have been promoting Australia very heavily for quite a while now.
I thought current GPS locations were limited in accuracy by the NSA in the US. I wouldn't plan on seeing this anytime soon in the states.
Just need to shrink 'em to keyring size and I'll be able to find my keys! ;)
That doesn't help where you can't get GPS - which is what this thing is for in the first place! It's for indoors, undergound etc.
No it doesn't. If the article gave you that incorrect impression there is another on the website of Australia's ABC Science Show from a program several months ago.
Such as underground where GPS signals do not go!
This has existed for years, and heaps of companies use it. from rio tinto automation to fork lifts and kalmars for product tracking. Sigh its paid advertising - a press release/paid feature. http://www.symeo.com/English/Products/Position-Measurement/LPR-products-for-position-measurement.html http://www.ctscts.com.au/shop/view/2d/41 http://www.idt.com.au/Stories/WSJ_Rio_Tinto_Perth%26Jupiter_Systems.pdf http://www.riotinto.com/documents/ReviewIssue90Jun09_the_shape_of_things_to_come.pdf
so they reinvented 1950's tech
It's not that at all and is news:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2010/3058425.htm
That doesn't help where you can't get GPS - which is what this thing is for in the first place! It's for indoors, undergound etc.
No it doesn't. If the article gave you that incorrect impression there is another on the website of Australia's ABC Science Show from a program several months ago.
Such as underground where GPS signals do not go!
Because I get lost walking from oneside of the bomb shelter to the other all the time.
It should actually be
slshdot == stagnated
Your welcome!
With the right equipment machinery now can achieve accuracy of 0.001in or ~25um. Better if you want to pay more -- the sensors used in nanometer positioning.
Use ~10cm accuracy GPS-mimic to arrive at your reference point, then use local positioning for where you need it.
From TFA: "and all the signals are synchronized to within two nanoseconds."
Light travels about 0.6m in 2ns, so this suggests accuracy will be much less than the ~3cm accuracy claimed by the summary. (If you have lots of base stations, you can do rather better than 0.6m, but a factor of 20 would not be feasible.)
Also - I didn't notice anything in the article to support the summary's "to the nearest inch" claim. Did I just miss it, or is this from some other undisclosed source?
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
A local---not global---positioning system?
Your welcome!
What about his welcome?
In the 70's/80's there was a lot of research carried out in Sydney using direct sequence spread spectrum for high accuracy location finding. I would guess this new system is a direct descendent of that original research. The police were very interested in the original system, which performed quite a bit better than GPS.
So what is new? Only the extra expense arising from the MIC connection.
With that kind of accuracy, it's almost like cheating. I want it now!
The era of modernity and forget alchemist practices.
You know, metric system. Science.
(Sorry my bad French) Je fais parler les Guignols de l'Info. Le pied, quoi.
No long time there will full of location hotspots.
Or he could be the one responsible for slashdot's stagnation.
English is not this
I listened to that one. It was an interesting talk including the developers past as a musician IIRC. Then again, Slashdot could do with more Science Show references.
They should strive make the tech small enough to fit in a keychain, cellphone and wallet.
Robotics? Who needs robotics...
Actually, the first thing I thought of was the ability to locate every firefighter on a fire scene; their location in three dimensions would allow for downed firefighters to be found much quicker.
and is commonly known in the industry as a pseudolite...
Hi, folks. I really appreciate the interest that seems to have been generated by our short introductory story to Tom Simonite at MIT Technology Review. It's fascinating to see “the experts” on this site shoot from the hip, with no investigation at all, and immediately assume we're some type of differential correction (no...), a reinvention of Loran (no..), some form of hybrid GPS/Inertial system (no...) or a pseudolite (ahhh HELL no!). Locata is a disruption to the industry because, plain and simple, it's LOCAL GPS without satellites, atomic clocks or the requirement to be “a nation” to provide this functionality. “Local” can be a room, a campus, an airport approach and landing area, or even an entire city in the future. We are the first and only company that can do this. We call it "Your Own GPS".
The most important thing you need to do initially is just FORGET about how it's done (hint it’s ALL about incredible new synchronization technology we’ve invented) because the really smart people will spend their time contemplating what the ramifications of this are for the world of positioning if we’re not full of BS. Full control over your positioning signal is an incredible advance in the art. Give it some thought; it’s worth the effort.
I’m going to give the Slashdot community a little inside peek at Locata. I’ve uploaded a Backgrounder doc to a download site. I think it will allow up to 500 downloads. Have a look and see the future. Enjoy. NunzioG
https://download.yousendit.com/T2dkckhVdGp1Yk9KUmNUQw (I hope Slashdot allows this sort of link on their comments page NG)
...my roomba won't get stuck under the bed anymore.
What's `a hell of a lot cheaper'? It's possible to use a smartphone as an RTK base station. That's pretty cheap--and shorter-range Wi-Fi GPS devices are even cheaper (the most expensive part in a smartphone is the `phone' module). Even if the recurring fees to subscribe to someone else's service are technically less than the cost of cheap-o base stations, I wonder if the availability of cheap-o base stations may mean that any cost-difference is too small to matter--e.g., a single-digit number of dollars saved or spent over the course of a year is insignificant enough to `get lost in the noise'.
-rozzin.
Any system which needs you to install additional hardware sucks. We can very well use the system planes used before GPS was deployed. INS using compasses and gyroscopes. You just need everyone to have a compass and gyroscope in their pockets. Wait everyone with an iPhone4 or a NexusS already does. Wifi based GPS enhancements are the buggy whip manufacturers of our day. Even the best and most accurate will be going out of business.
**Life is too short to be serious**
There is a lot of confusion among the early commenters. Some think this is a form of differential GPS, some think this is a network of WiFi devices, or a hybrid of WiFi and FM radio.
It appears to be none of the above.
It most likely is a pseudo-lite (a terrestrial device which mimics a satellite), except that it does not operate in the GPS (L1 or L2) band(s). The government, researchers, FAA and Air Force (which runs GPS) are working on real pseudolites which may run in the GPS bands. But this private company couldn't get rights to do that, so they are transmitting in 'the same band(s) used by WiFi. That is, they are broadcasting spread spectrum signals in the ISM band(s).
They apparently scatter a number of these, at highly precise locations, and a compatible user device would then listen to several and calculate its own position. Since their geometry is as flat as the nearby terrain, they will have very poor altitude accuracy, but because they don't have bending or delays in the atmosphere (or rather, those inaccuracies are trivial in comparison), they will likely have very good 2D accuracy.
Notice that things flying over the top of these devices would likely have good 3D (the geometry improves for them).
What is less clear is why this is preferable to using DGPS. DGPS is a 'station' at a known location which can measure the errors of each satellite (including bending/delay) and transmits corrections to nearby devices. DGPS is a government service in many areas, I believe, but can be set up as a private service, too.
The one real liability to the new Locata system, if I understand it (and I probably don't) is that they don't necessarily use GPS time. One of the really fabulous things about GPS is that it established a world-wide synchronous, highly accurate clock. In many applications that may not matter. It does for a lot of systems which rely on GPS time (too many to mention nowadays).
Also from TFA:
Enge says it is likely that these pseudolites will rely on time signals sent over the Internet, using a new protocol that enables high accuracy.
He doesn't say, but I assume he is talking about Precision Time Protocol, which allows for sub-microsecond precision. With that, the claim of 3cm is totally realistic.
I'll agree that I'm making some assumptions since this is a shit article.
However, the main takeaway from this is the idea of using devices without an on-board atomic clock & instead using a clock that must stay in sync. It is a neat idea & might work, but I wouldn't want anyone's life to depend on it.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
"Before I start drilling into this wall, what's on the other side of this exact point right here?" (points at spot on the wall).
The point on the backside of that wall is in another room in the building. To get there, you might have to go thru a maze of doors and other rooms, making it virtually impossible to measure with tape-measure around corners and through doorways, to discover that exact point's equivalent on the back-side.
With a localized GPS system, it would be so easy to know the exact point. You could have a hand-held sensor like a stud finder, place it on the front side of the wall and click the button, then walk around to the room on the other side of the wall and move it around, watching the "distance from the first point I clicked, in inches". When you find where the closest distance is on the back wall, that's the point directly opposite.
I've needed something like that a couple of times in the past few years during home repair tasks. Think how useful it would be to general contractors and construction workers.