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Ask Dr. Ramsey Faragher About Navigation/Positioning Technology
Dr. Ramsey Faragher graduated from the University of Cambridge in 2004 with a first-class degree in Experimental and Theoretical Physics. He then completed a PhD in 2007 at Cambridge in Opportunistic Radio Positioning under the direction of Dr. Peter Duffett-Smith, a world expert in this field. He is now a Principal Scientist at the BAE Systems Advanced Technology Centre specializing in positioning, navigation, sensor fusion and remote sensing technologies in the land, air, sea and space domains. We recently covered his NAVSOP project, an advanced positioning system that exploits existing transmissions such as Wi-Fi, TV, radio and mobile phone signals, to calculate the user’s location to within a few meters. Dr. Faragher has graciously agreed to answer any questions you may have about NAVSOP, the future of GPS, or what a theoretical physicist puts on his business card. Ask as many questions as you like, but please confine your questions to one per post.
He seems to have written a post on how this works and then later made an account. Sorta verified here. His post is very informative and might answer a lot of questions and generate more meaningful ones.
My work here is dung.
How much of this can be done automatically and how much of this must be hand guided? For example you talked about fingerprints changing over time and being used only as a guide. Is there a measurement or confidence variable that you can employ to automate when the fingerprint is still valid or has morphed too much? Or is that something that a human overlord must monitor and do research to notice that a new apartment building has just been opened and there are now hundreds of new signals? It feels like you are using an open domain that could have outliers and irregularities that require a human to clean the data before it can be trusted to give you low false positives and true negatives. What statistical methods do you use to overcome these sort of real world problems so that your system can be put anywhere and work?
My work here is dung.
Hi, Dr Ramsey!
What is your best estimate as to what is the US DOD's current GPS backup system?
IIRC Obama cut the budget for LORAN around 2010 and till then the system was financed with the explicit explanation and purpose - GPS backup. But no more...
I am currently teaching ECDIS systems to mariners and I always emphasize the weaknesses of GPS under jamming. Ever since Selective Availability has been switched off, the jamming topic pops up more and more as a soft spot of the whole process, so I think we are not fooling ourselves that the US would let down such a gaping hole in its systems uncovered...
Now, Make Your WISE Move...
What potential do you see in the combination of these "opportunity" signals (Wifi etc.) that are to be used in NAVSOP and data from sensors like an air-pressure sensor, accelerometers etc.?