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DARPA Develops Non-GPS Navigation Chip
Zothecula writes "The Global Positioning System (GPS) has proved a boon for those with a bad sense of direction, but the satellite-based system isn't without its shortcomings. Something as simple as going indoors or entering a tunnel can render the system useless. That might be inconvenient for civilians, but it's potentially disastrous to military users, for whom the system was originally built. DARPA is addressing such concerns with the development of a self-sufficient navigation system that can aid navigation when GPS is temporarily unavailable."
âoeBoth the structural layer of the sensors and the integrated package are made of silica,â said Andrei Shkel, DARPA program manager. âoeThe hardness and the high-performance material properties of silica make it the material of choice for integrating all of these devices into a miniature package. The resulting TIMU is small enough and should be robust enough for applications (when GPS is unavailable or limited for a short period of time) such as personnel tracking, handheld navigation, small diameter munitions and small airborne platforms.â
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well, now they will have their self aiming bullets and self propelling, self aiming, manoeuvring grenades.
I say bullets and grenades, because why else would you care to track indoors, it's not a missile or a big bomb that will go there, a big bomb will just take your entire 'indoors' and make it 'outdoors'. Bullets and self propelled grenades on the other hand...
At least it's nice to know that at some point some of this may end up in civilian robotics, otherwise it's just terrible. You thought you could hide in your house from a drone machine gun? No, now we'll have crazy smart bullets to take care of the terrorists, that's right, the terrorists in their caves.
Drone planes, drone bombs, drone missiles, soon drone bullets, drone knives. They really don't like having to give orders to actual people, do they, knowing that people may not always take the orders if they disagree with them.
You can't handle the truth.
Embedded car GPS systems are linked to the car speed data, and when entering a long tunnel, will continue to move the position correctly.
For this limited scenario, it appears to the user as if the GPS was active all along.
So basically inertial navigation used in rockets since the 40s, but in smaller package using semiconductor gyros and accelerometers.
I want this for my bike if it's cheap enough.
Missiles have had inertial navigation systems for some time now. Where's the advance that brings this technology to regular consumers?
if you are indoors you probably know where you are
if you go into a tunnel, you will come out and get the signal again. and its not like you need to navitage inside a tunnel.
this is probably to defeat jamming. GPS signals are low power. Lightsquared showed that it won't take too much to jam them.
kind of hard to launch cruise missiles into an enemy nation if they set up GPS jammers within their borders
It wouldn't be disastrous for military applications, because military navigators are all trained on how to navigate without GPS. And they practice it. Also, does anyone lose their way going into a tunnel? Maybe a mining complex or caves or something....
It works by have six-axis, extremely sensitive, gyroscopes and accelerometers. Thus it can extrapolate position within a margin of error, hopefully long enough to get back in range of GPS.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
What the article is describing (an IMU) have been around forever (since before GPS), and pretty much any system that uses GPS for navigation has one to supplement the GPS. What is new here is the size; a full IMU on a single chip the size of your pinky finger nail. Pretty cool considering that not too long ago these used to comprise of multiple separate physical devices (gyrometer x3, accellerometer x3, magnetometer), but have been getting progressively smaller over the years. MEMs has come a long way.
The sensors are packed onto a single chip in six microfabricated layers that are each just 50 microns thick, which is approximately the thickness of a human hair. At just 10 cubic millimeters in size, the whole package is smaller than a U.S. penny.
Funny, that's just were I found one.
Inertial navigation systems have been around for a long time - certainly predating GPS. Commercial aircraft fly with them (to be independent). They are small enough to be added to small drones - though they are not "chip-scale". Precise, robust ones are very expensive, and perhaps addressing the price is one of their goals, though the blurb doesn't state that. They also need to be re-calibrated regularly (ever seen exact position information at locations where aircraft park?), but again, I don't see how the DARPA project addresses it. It would be nice to have a miniature-INS for indoors navigation, but only if it's a chip for less than $10 or so...
nothing new about gyroscopes and accelerometers in a package, even an integrated circuit one.....this might be smaller or perhaps more accurate than some I've seen over the DECADES. but definitely no new tech or ideas here.
The story here is they made a really small INU & timing module. AHRS/IMU/INU (among other acronyms) have been around for a very long time. This is simply a very, very, small one, that is probably cheaper to produce than exsiting MEMS systems. Of course, it won't have the accuracy of the larger systems, but that's part of the trade offs.
The only way you could get lost is if you punched an angry bear and your body was devoured in to bearhell.
The only problem with preloaded maps, however, is they go out of date after a period.
Although I say that when my back garden satellite data on Google Maps... is older than Google Maps...
It isn't so much a problem when it is just my silly back garden, but it IS a HUGE problem when the whole outskirts of my town are COMPLETELY different.
There is huge hotels, restaurants, factories and various other facilities, an entire expansion of the town in space worth around 1/5th the size of the town previous to it.
And that also includes the main roads in to the town and connecting a large section of other nearby towns and villages.
(if you are wondering where this is I am speaking of, it is here: http://goo.gl/maps/EnpnU )
But in the end, the required data for such a system would only need to be decent enough to be able to find your way to settlements that are at least >80% of the time going to still be around in some useful sense, so the system will still be incredibly useful for that purpose, especially travellers.
Just don't pull any Nathan Drake nonsense and piss off some angry armies who want some gold.
Passive radiation location services are going to be very important as well.
It will be providing new radars for some airports in the near future, if they think it is safe enough to use for such a high accuracy requiring tech that would endanger many lives if it screwed up, it is more than capable of being used for passive location services.
The size of that chip is amazing as well. Very good work.
I just wonder how accurate such a small chip will be overall. In some cases, smaller might not be better, but I am not entirely sure if this would apply to sensors of these types. Anyone?
military navigators are all trained on how to navigate without GPS
I'm sure their concern is with autonomous drone navigation. Perhaps like the one that Iran captured sometime last year.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
I used an old school Garmin handheld GPS for many years. While it was frustrating to not have a signal, at least the damn thing didn't FUCKING LIE TO ME like GMAPS on my smartphone does. One step forward, two steps back.
So when can I get these at digikey?
who are working on different solutions to indoor navigation too (IPS)
One of them is IndoorAtlas who are working on using disruption of earth's geomagnetic field from buildings for navigation and the other one is the turku based company Walkbase who are using wifi for IPS.
It may not be the same but there are a bunch of companies around the world working on indoor navigation without the need for GPS in general
As others have posted, intertial nav platforms have been around for decades -- in military aircraft, and then in commercial aircraft.
The break throughs are not only in getting the platform sensors, the gyros, accelerometers, and magnetometers, onto a single chip, but also in being able to provide the computer horsepower to do the Kalman filtering to integrate all these sensors to come out with a nav/position solution, in a few cubic centimeters of processed sand, and for a few Watts.
It's not just the sensors, it's the processing as well. The sensors just throw data at you (data with all sorts of errors); the Kalman filter lets you bring everything together for your nav/position solution. As a prof long ago said it, "Kalman filtering -- how to stop worrying and learn to love matrix inversion."
One major application for this is terminal guidance for munitions, like the Joint Direct Attack Munition and surface-to-ground missiles like the Hellfire. Those need an IMU so they can hit targets with GPS jammers. They get an initial position from the aircraft, which has a better IMU and upward-looking antennas which can probably get GPS despite ground jammers. All the small IMU has to do is keep a good position and heading for about a minute.
As this gets smaller, it becomes usable on more munitions, such as mortar rounds. Eventually, most indirect fire ammo will have this.
hard to remember that far back, but I think we called 'em "maps" and you could roll them up or fold them and carry a lot of them in a small space. no electricity, no radio, no gigabits, and they worked everywhere. if DARPA would like to send be a hundred pounds of $100 bills, I would take some time to consult on this in my spare time.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Computational Orienteering Map Processing Assist Simulation Service
or
Compass for short.
if you are indoors you probably know where you are
Let me introduce you to the Great White North:
PATH is downtown Toronto's underground walkway linking 28 kilometres of shopping, services and entertainment.
PATH facts:
According to Guinness World Records, PATH is the largest underground shopping complex with 29 km (18 miles) of shopping arcades. It has 371,600 sq. metres (4 million sq. ft) of retail space. In fact, the retail space connected to PATH rivals the West Edmonton Mall in size.
The approximate 1,200 shops and services, such as photocopy shops and shoe repairs, found in PATH, employ about 5,000 people. Once a year, businesses in PATH host the world's largest underground sidewalk sale.
More than 50 buildings/office towers are connected through PATH. Twenty parking garages, five subway stations, two major department stores, six major hotels, and a railway terminal are also accessible through PATH. It also provides links to some of Toronto's major tourist and entertainment attractions such as: the Hockey Hall of Fame, Roy Thomson Hall, Air Canada Centre, Rogers Centre, and the CN Tower. City Hall and Metro Hall are also connected through PATH.
There are more than 125 grade level access points and 60 decision points where a pedestrian has to decide between turning left or right, or continuing straight on. The average size of a connecting link is 20 metres (66 ft.) long by 6 metres (20 ft.) wide.
Signage includes a symbol for people with disabilities whenever there is a flight of stairs ahead.
PATH Facts
nothing new about gyroscopes and accelerometers in a package, even an integrated circuit one.....this might be smaller or perhaps more accurate than some I've seen over the DECADES. but definitely no new tech or ideas here.
yeah.. the first autopilots worked on those gyro+accel principles.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
no patent, sorry
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
and the oscillation overthruster didn't even kick in :-) It was the new tunnel that replaces Devil's Slide Rd. south of San Francisco, and my GPS didn't have a map update for the recently-opened tunnel, so it showed me driving right through the mountain.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
There's a respectably large underground complex in Crystal City, on the south side of Washington DC, though it's not quite Toronto scale. A subway station, a mall with food court, entrances to office buildings, bottom floors of a couple of hotels. I had some business trips where entered the subway at National Airport (briefly above ground) and didn't come out of the tunnels again until I left town. There's an elevator in the complex that tells you what floor you're on which was confused one day (telling me I was one floor below the one I was really on), and unfortunately I didn't have time to take it down to the basement to see what it would say about it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
What percentage of tunnels, that a motorist can enter, have more than one exit?
Nothing new to see here. Move along, velocity unchanged.
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