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Australia Has Moved 1.5 Metres, So It's Updating Its Location For Self-Driving Cars (cnet.com)
An anonymous reader shares a CNET report: Australia is changing from "down under" to "down under and across a bit". The country is shifting its longitude and latitude to fix a discrepancy with global satellite navigation systems. Government body Geoscience Australia is updating the Geocentric Datum of Australia, the country's national coordinate system, to bring it in line with international data. The reason Australia is slightly out of whack with global systems is that the country moves about 7 centimetres (2.75 inches) per year due to the shifting of tectonic plates. Since 1994, when the data was last recorded, that's added up to a misalignment of about a metre and a half. While that might not seem like much, various new technology requires location data to be pinpoint accurate. Self-driving cars, for example, must have infinitesimally precise location data to avoid accidents. Drones used for package delivery and driverless farming vehicles also require spot-on information.ABC has more details.
Somehow I suspect it's a matter of centimeters rather than nanometers. Need less hyperbole and more accuracy!
A human uses local, relative, dynamic data to navigate complex routes. If your system requires global, absolute, static data, then you're doing it wrong.
I'm sorry, but when driving I do not have "infinitesimally accurate location data". I have eyes and ears, I and use them to not get in accidents. Turns out that many things on roads are not fixed at all and may appear or disappear at any time...
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I always knew they were a little off
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If it was the case we would be in deep trouble considering the typical error in GPS. That is the reason why other sensors like LIDAR and cameras are also used. GPS is for having a general clue where you are, and 1,5 m accuracy would be plenty for that.
Slashdot editing...
Does this mean that Apple Maps is now correct? I'm tired of seeing so many Kangaroo's drive off into the Ocean because they relied too heavily on the Maps app.
[...] must have infinitesimally precise location data [...]
No wonder the Tesla self-driving AI is getting into crashes. It's too busy figuring out the Archilles and the tortoise paradox.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno's_paradoxes#Achilles_and_the_tortoise
So that's how you relocate a penal colony of that size.
Australia just can't move freely around the globe without something else moving. So is happening to the other tectonic plates?
The ABC link mentions that the Australian plate is moving North at 7cm/year and that the Pacific plate is moving West at 11cm/year, but surely they can't be the only ones that move.
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...where's my continent?
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Everyone knows that a GPS like TomTom doesn't rely on the GPS coordinates it's given. Instead it assumes that it is on a road, assuming slightly stronger that it is on the road it's supposed to be on than on a nearby road, and corrects it's position.
A TomTom would not be able to recognise for example that you are driving on the wrong side of the motorway. It would find your rough position (GPS is "rough" with an error of a few meters if you're lucky), detects your motion vector, the figures out the location on its map where you are most likely to be.
Precision GPS needs to be with respect to a set of base stations. Like the Continuously Operating Reference Station (CORS) https://www.ngs.noaa.gov/CORS.
There is no reason why the coordinate frame cannot be defined to move with the subcontinent.
The CONUS has portions that move in different directions so we both attach the coordinate frame to one of the plates, and do periodic readjustments
http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/web/surveys/NA2011/
Rather than wait until someone notices a large margin of error, why not install immobile beacons in key locations that constantly monitor their locations and report back any differences?
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I used to bullseye womp rats in my T-16 back home. They're not much bigger than two meters. But, now I miss because GPS is off.
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The point is that that data means nothing when there's construction, or the edge of the road is washed out, or a car (or truck...) is stopped in the road... I would expect self-driving cars to use GPS only for an idea of where they are and what roads to use to reach a destination; for actually driving GPS is utterly useless because anything about a road can change any time, you have to use some kind of sensors to figure out how to drive on the road you are on, not the road as fixed GPS data in a database somewhere imagines it might be.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
On the move!!!
They have roads in the Outback?
What's the law for figuring out who owns what land in Australia?
Seems if it wasn't written carefully some people could adversely possess a sliver (perhaps an important sliver!) of someone else's land.
.. precisely to avoid having the ability for a drone to deliver a package to a very particular location?
Well, if everything had been done relative to the same datum to begin with, why would it matter that it shifted? Or perhaps the issue is that things have been incrementally added to databases based on the same datum which is slowly drifting off correct that is the problem...
That's the most convenient explanation at the moment.
As long as you have a map, there are roads.
If you don't have a map, it might be debatable.
It is 2016... roads, we do not need roads!
That's nothing, in Chile we move a couple meters every 2 years. They are call earthquakes.
That's why I've been missing Pokemon
Australia is changing from "down under" to "down under and across a bit".
Men at Work re-unite to update song lyrics.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Of course, at least AU is not sinking, like NY, LA and Miami.
Ozlanders are shifty buggers!
Politicians will push for movements against continental drift like they do climate change.
Oh wait, AUS not USA.
If Australia could move off the face of the Earth and into space, that would be great.
Pref. into the Sun.
Actually, they're the ones standing still, it's the rest of the world that's moved.
In all seriousness though, does anyone know what the GPS system itself uses as a reference point to correct for system drift?
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As if PST wasn't bad enough, what kind of pain will it be to partially migrate through a new time zone over a period of a millennium...
Nanometers may be small, but they're not infinitely small, which is what infinitesimal means. They're barely even any closer to infinitely small than centimeters.
Well, FWIW, *both* of them are infinitely larger than infinitesimal despite the fact that nanometres are closer. So does this mean that the "infinity" between centimetres and infinitesimal is larger than the infinity between nanometres and infinitesimal? Hmmmmmm......
:-)
Also, imagine a line of people standing single-file, extending infinitely in both directions. There are, of course, an infinite number of people. Now, imagine each of these people is joined by a partner. Are there twice as many people now? Does this mean there are "2 x infinity" people? But surely you can't do that to infinity. Er...
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Spoiler; I'm not a mathematician, and don't have the answers, I'm just throwing this out here for amusement. Though I guess someone who knows more about this than I do could explain it if they could be arsed.
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An unfortunate GPS discrepancy.
"Self-driving cars, for example, must have infinitesimally precise location data to avoid accidents"
Um, try feet. The car's GPS could be off by FEET and nothing should go wrong. Self driving cars only should only need GPS to get an idea of where they are going and make sure they are on track for that. They should be using the cameras and sensors mounted on the car for the finer controls, like parking, where to turn, where the sidewalk is, the dog crossing the street, etc.
RTK GNSS (not just GPS, but GPS, Glonass, Baidu and the english one whose name I forget), using virtual reference stations over a cell network, can give you centimetre precision at greater than 20Hz. They don't have that in a TomTom though.
Self-driving cars, for example, must have [...] precise location data to avoid accidents.
Should be a no brainer that self driving cars don't use GPS for their "self driving". Besides the fact that your "GPS location" can be off by dozens of meters for no apparent reason, it can be gone completely in tunnels, parking houses, between sky scrapers etc. Should be a no brainer that a car can not use GPS for anything than plotting a course from A to B. Everything else is done with cameras, lidar, radar and even ultra sonics.
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I've had the GPS in my phone correctly identify which lane I was in on I-35, even with multiple lane changes to verify.
Moderate drunk! It's more fun that way!
Self-driving cars, for example, must have infinitesimally precise location data to avoid accidents.
If self driving cars are more reliant on GPS data than actual real world feed back to avoid accidents then they better be banned as I don't want that shit anywhere near me.
So Australia moved a metre and a half, and their gps wasn't updated.
That explains how they came to be all driving on the wrong side of the road.
Does that also explain why they've got a whole continent to themselves, but there are only 24 million people there?
It must be they're the survivors of the switchover to wrong-side driving.