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Dead Reckoning For Your Car Eliminates GPS Dead Zones
cartechboy writes "We've all been there. You're relying on your vehicle's built-in navigation system to get to that meeting downtown, but then suddenly the car loses the satellite signal due to the concrete skyscraper canyon you're in--and you're about to be late. Swiss semiconductor manufacturer U-Blox thinks it has the solution with 3D Automotive Dead Reckoning, or 3D ADR for short. It's a new navigation chip that uses the vehicle's built-in sensors to track speed, horizontal movement, and elevation. The 3D ADR system measures movement in three dimensions, letting the navigation system can keep track of the vehicle's location even when it loses its connection to GPS satellites. Imagine never having to see your navigation screen saying connection lost again. In an age where our phones have accelerometers and compasses, it's amazing your car is still trying to catch up, right?"
Seriously this isn't new. Good in-car nav systems have had dead reckoning based on wheel position + speed for ages.
Catch all placeholder.
.. and we've had 2D dead reckoning for YEARS, across many different OEMs... and it's still not always perfect (in under water tunnels, for example)
but why 3D? Do you really care which level of the parking garage you're driving on?
Actually I think it's the opposite, it's only being in a car that makes dead reckoning with any kind of accuracy feasible. A car is a reasonably large and stable platform, which already has good speed information, and can have some accelerometer-type information added relatively easily. A smartphone does have an accelerometer, but the data is far too noisy to do reasonable dead reckoning, because in addition to the macro movements (someone walking, biking, or driving down a street) there area bunch of micro-movements that produce high local acceleration (putting the phone in/out of pockets, taking steps while the phone's in your pocket, etc.). It makes for a much more complex dead-reckoning problem, because instead of just tracking broad movements (car goes 10m this way) you have to resolve a ton of tiny movements (phone was moved 0.3m into pocket, then rapidly accelerated 0.1m left due to owner being jostled on the subway, etc.), which tend to pile too much accelerometer noise on top of the broader movements that you really want to track.
In short, taking a known starting position and keeping it updated via accelerometer data is a lot easier if your accelerometer is on a car, vs. on a handheld device.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
There was a system called ETAK (1983... see wikipedia). At the time they "Said" Etak was a Polynesian word that meant "the world moves" and that the technique came from the polynesian nevigation methods.
Nothing new to see here... Just repackaging masquerading as new
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Fork /.
Beta, brought to you by the same people that fucked Sourceforge.
Fork or die.
Don't forget nntp://comp.misc on Usenet
(although I doubt there are any modern browsers that support the nntp:// protocol* anymore so you will have to join mainly by downloading a free usenet client, sign up to eternal-september.org and adding comp.misc to your subscribed newsgroup list)
Still, if people are willing to use old school IRC then Usenet isn't much worse ;-)
* similar to PIN number
My 7-year-old Prius tracks my movements in tunnels, inside a garage with no GPS, etc. It indicates my changing heading and position as I back out of a parking space, etc.
Beta is more than cosmetics or aesthetics. The new design ruins the one thing that makes /. what it is -- the commenting system. I only come here for the comments, not the 2-day old articles nor the erroneous summaries.
I do not see the changes of Beta as improvements. What is wrong with Slashdot that demands breaking its foundations? This is not change for the sake of change, but, as others have commented, an attempt to monetize /. at any any cost, and its users be damned.
Our complaints have fallen on deaf ears, and will continue to do so. Dice intends to dispose of Classic in favor of Beta, whether we like it or not. Do you know how to tell whether an executive really cares about feedback? If her CV doesn't proclaim the following "successes":
Proven track record innovating and improving iconic websites (CNET.com, Dice.com, Slashdot.org, Sourceforge.net) while protecting their voice and brand integrity
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't a GPS (or, Localized Positioning System?) that doesn't need to connect to a network be good for privacy? If it is, that could be a good marketing angle.
seriously, my old bimmer's on-board navigation already did this 15 years ago ! other than that, I've used u-blox in several embedded designs, and they are by far the most fun GPS unit to play with. They have some great pc software for it too. And they've had this functionality for quite some time now. oh yeah, and boo to beta..
The title is misleading. They use accelerators and vehicle speed to navigate. It aint dead reckoning
Why 3D? Because GPS provides your elevation and uses that as well as your XY coordinates to determine where you are, trip time, etc.
Contrary to the assertion in the story, I've never been there.
Don't know who well it works, but there was a demo by Apple's iOS developers where they combine GPS and WiFi. In towns with large buildings and awful GPS reception you will usually have tons of WiFi signals around, so at least in principle it should be possible to improve navigation using both.
True, this isn't new, but highlighting this fact for every car and improving the technology can make things better for consumers. Aircraft systems have been using it for many years. It would be better if the car had another type of location reference other than GPS, though. Implanting cell tower recognition and interrogation for triangulation would be a way, but would probably require a lot of coordination between the auto industry and FCC.
Our brains have had dead reckoning since the dawn of time. Pilots use it every day. What ever happened to opening up a map and figuring it out for ourselves? Anybody remember Thomas Bros? I'm not in any way against technology, but seriously...if the GPS goes out, figure it out yourself.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2013/08/17/our-brains-pay-price-for-gps/d2Tnvo4hiWjuybid5UhQVO/story.html
Just sayin'...
Believe me, when your GPS tells you to go straight ahead because that's where the exit is but you're still on the 6th floor, yes, you definitely do!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yeah sure, we need several million Slashdot clones ... ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
A few months ago I left work to run some errands and stuck my Android phone in its car charging dock (which automatically activated my preferred nav program). Six or seven miles down the road I noticed the icon representing my car was different than normal and my location was about a half-block off my actual position. At the next stoplight I checked and discovered my GPS was turned off. My phone had reasonably calculated my position through several turns and stops using only the accelerometer (dead-reckoning). At the time I was impressed.
Beta sux! Join the Slashcott! http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4760465&cid=46173047
"We've all been there. You send the money to the Nigerian prince so that he can finally pay the transfer fee to send you his ten million dollars." Seriously, you said something equivalent, but the context made it sound like you weren't joking.
As far as is possible for a generalization on the Internet, that's kind of insulting, don't you think? Nobody is really that stupid, except for the kind of people you read about in Darwin Awards.
Using interactive computer maps: sure! Relying on them, and not already knowing where you're going in advance? Please, please tell me there isn't someone who does that, yet is old enough to know how to type sentences into Slashdot forms. If I do happen to be addressing such a person: no, I haven't "been there," and yes, I am calling you a fucking moron who I never want to have anything to do with, because I have no illusions that such magnitude of idiocy could be contained to a single personality quirk: I know you ooze imbecility from every part of your personality. You're an embarrassment to the human race, and we won't miss you when you're gone.
Who would use GPS to navigate inside a parking garage?
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
One of the first things any student pilot learns is to stop looking at the GPS and start looking out the fucking window. This principle is just as valid for driving a car. The GPS is not the terrain, and neither is a paper map. Pull your head out of your ass and start using it.
We used dead reckoning in the early 1980s to fill in for missing GPS satellites before all of them were even in orbit.
The PROBLEM that exists, is error rates. Once on dead reckoning, the error grows from a few inches to a few feet within seconds. This is not a problem for ocean going ships... But a severe problem for cars.
Use of accelerometers is only to reduce the error. Unfortunately, accelerometers can be wrong - due to rotation, deceleration, and acceleration when there is no feedback on WHAT is causing the readings. Especially when due to vibration. Anything that is a multiple of the sampling frequency causes erroneous readings - and can make it appear that a vehicle is moving in one direction... but due to sampling error, misses the reverse.
My old cheap Samsung tracks via accel. and compass most of the time, because the GPS is so poor. As long as it can get a GPS fix every few minutes it covers up for the crappy GPS antenna quite well. IIRC the 'Tomtom' that I used to use at work would do the same thing, only of course it didnt need the capability near as often, but you could drive through a long tunnel with it and still show actual position until the signal re-established at the other end.
Presumably there is something new here, but the basic concept certainly is not.
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i must be the only person who uses paper maps, a compass and triangulation of known landmarks. seriously, i use a compass inside a car. it works 99% of the time unless i am near a strong electromagnetic field or a ferromagnetic metal like iron.
People that need to use a GPS inside a parking garage, for one.
rewriting history since 2109
Being a Sprint customer?
GPS elevation measurements are notoriously problematic unless you have survey-class equipment. (I also wonder how many map application programmers can actually work with WGS84 elevation data.)
Ezekiel 23:20
A self-driving car? (In conjunction with other sensors, I assume.)
Ezekiel 23:20
People who couldn't find their way out of a parking garage if the exits had signs and there were arrows on the floor leading them in the right direction. Basically people with the same level of intelligence as those who are pushing the Beta of this very site.
The automotive nav system I work on has 2D dead reckoning, relying on GPS for altitude. 3D dead reckoning is news to me, and I suspect is the intended newsworthy bit here. When GPS fails and the digital terrain model doesn't account for urban landscapes like parking garages, both above and below ground, and tunnels, positioning is calculated in software. It's an expensive, imperfect process I imagine can at least be offloaded to sensors, if not improved, as possibly done in this chip. That would certainly free up the radio to provide more accurate positioning and guidance quicker.
Yep, my 2001 Acura has it too. They use wheel sensor data for speed and a gyro compass for azimuth. It works very well.
They've tied into the vehicle VSS and have gyros built in to help with issues like this (and it works rather well)
A GPS which receives speed, wheel position and reverse light data from the car does dead reckoning. I watched a friend's car do it just this weekend as we drove into an underground parking garage where you get no GPS reception.
Dead reckoning for car NAVs has been around forever, it actually predates GPS. The first in-car NAV systems by Etak were made using only maps and dead reckoning because GPS didn't exist yet. It also predated affordable LCD panels.
Before accelerometers and gyros were cheap Garmin even made add-on GPSes for cars which required installation so the NAV could get speedometer data and reverse light data so it could dead reckon your position.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
All car navigation systems pretty much required this when the GPS system was still hobbled by the ~100m uncertainty caused by Selective Availability. (Ended by Clinton in May 2000).
The implementation is actually quite trivial: One sensor on each front wheel gives you two revolution counters (odometers).
Distance traveled is proportional to the sum of the two counters, while the difference in counts is proportional to how much you have turned.
As long as you have GPS reception you can use that to calibrate the odometers, so that differences in tire type & pressure is automatically compensated for.
Using a barometer you can do the same for altitude, automatically compensating for changes in local air pressure.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
Who would use GPS to navigate inside a parking garage?
Not to navigate, hopefully. But in a large parking garage that you don't know well, it would be useful to be able to use GPS to remember where your car is and find it again.
Nuclear submarines use them too! :-)
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
Why 3D? Because some places have lots of elevated highways (as well as parallel roads underneath them).
But mostly because GPS works in 3D, and re-acquiring the signal is faster the more accurate the 3D estimated location is.
It's probably too late to turn back the clock on this, but it's actually spelled "ded" reckoning. Short for "DEDuced".
Something queasy about the way this product is spelled...
I can only see one possible outcome of that. -- "Uh, where was my car again?" - (checks GPS) - "Oh, right, it's still right under my butt, duh."
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
We love our furlongs, chains, drams, grains, pounds, ounces, cups, gallons, slugs, fortnights, etc. Speaking as an engineer, calculations work just fine in either, but I prefer a system with history and finesse, you uncultured swine!
What about in the maze of tunnels that run under Sydney?
When I worked for Navman we developed some of the first consumer in car navigation systems. We looked at this technology around 2002. Nothing new here...
Not new at all.
I know I can upset my ABS system, bringing on the the error light, by doing burnouts and handbrake slides. Burnouts give false readings on the from wheels and handbrake slides give false reading on the rear wheels.
Would play havoc with such systems but to be fair I don't normally do these while navigating.
Dead reckoning technology is actually very old. It has been used to guide missiles, submarines, and of course cars for decades even before the GPS was invented. It is the technology used by sailors before they had GPS as well. The idea is simple and complex at the same time: use some specific known reference, guess what's happening in the absence of reference, and recalibrate once a new reference becomes available again . References can be the sun, stars, towns, or GPS itself.
In car dead reckoning, in contrary to what the article says, you typically don't use acceleration sensors. You typically use vehicle speed and yaw rate sensor. This gives you enough information to determine whether you've turned, and where you are along the road. If you can safely assume that you are following the road on your digital map, this is actually quite accurate. It becomes tricky if you are airborne and free to fly around, but also possible.
The nice thing about GPS is that the kalman filter used to compute your position and velocity can be easily extended to include additional sensors such as yaw rate and speed, available on any modern vehicles CAN bus. The only trick is to have the navigation system hooked into the vehicle, and this is one of the main advantage of built-in systems (the other being driver assistance functions taking advantage of map data for enhanced functionality)
I think there were some navigation systems manufactures trying to achieve similar results by adding accelerometers to the receivers. Since people usually use these devices to follow a guided route, a yaw rate sensor to detect turns is not essential, and detecting stop conditions in urban canyons or tunnels can be detected via accelerometers.
The possibilities are endless and they have been used forever in the navigation industry. The article is extremely misleading by claiming that this is new, or hasn't been done before. Nevertheless a cool technology.
Forest GTA 5 have it
What are they smoking at the /. basement? This is old archived news with dust and coffee stains presented in a new giftwrap.
Dice, You have forced people to test the beta version now to get some feedback, and you have got feedback. lots of feedback. It must be pretty obvious now what people think about it. Even if you are not willing to do what you should (put the beta version in the garbage can, or maybe a "slashdot labs" experimental sand box where it belongs), you must by now have enough feedback for a while that you can use for your development.
Stop redirecting to the fucking beta version now!!!
You do not need more beta-testing now. start coding. you can come back after six month and ask again.
But please don't do a HTTP 302 redirect then, thanks.
Ever mounted a dash-board nav and wondered why there is a configuration option for the tilt angle? It's not for the display or anything else for the UI, it's simply so the gyroscope within the unit can be interpreted correctly. Add speed signal and reverse gear switch (also a standard input since ever), and everything needed for a GPS-less continued tracking is available.
Errr, no.
What is the usage case again?
You're in a concrete canyon downtown. So what the fuck are you doing driving? That's what taxis and tube trains and buses are for. Cars in the city centre are almost always a guarantee for frustration and delay.
Besides, if it's your own city, how on earth can you exist without knowing it at least as well as the Sat Nav, and also knowing the pedestrian-only short cuts that go against the flow of one-way streets, across parks and directly under 14-way road junctions designed to get people from somewhere where you didn't start, going to somewhere you're not going to.
Do people not use their brains these days?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
One word, Etak.
Dead reckoning automotive navigation predates GPS and predates what would have become Geostar. Sure, the hardware is cheaper now, and algorithms might be better, but there's nothing new about this concept. Welcomed? Sure. But don't pretend it's a new idea.
Car electronics are perpetually shit, out of date, and overpriced. Put the feature on my phone I don't care if it won't be as accurate.