Pardon the absence; I’ve spent some time at a DARPA meeting reviewing progress on work being done under the umbrella of DARPA’s efforts to shrink the hardware for devices related to position, navigation and time, known as MicroPNT. I can’t write about any of the details, which is unfortunate because some of the science and engineering is amazing, but you can get an overview of the program and learns some of the particulars:
Expert Advice: The Chip-Scale Combinatorial Atomic Navigator
Basically DARPA has identified that portable navigation devices that aren’t tied to GPS are important, and are pushing smart people to think about the problem. The program goals are aggressive and each stage progressively so, and they expect the failure rate to be high. But the people involved are scientists, so they understand that research doesn’t always pan out. Such programs allow scientists to try risky things to see if they pan out, and even in failure things are learned.
Listening to all of these talks and visiting the posters has been quite draining.
Monday’s post now seems quite timely, as that seems to be a European effort along these same lines.
Sounds like interesting stuff.
GPS congestion/maps/routing (more specifically, how the software behaves, not the hardware) is becoming a real issue these days so it’s good to see that alternatives are being actively researched.
It wouldn’t be hard to incorporate routines into GPS software that test for obvious fails and changes the units behavior accordingly (i.e. increasing poll times and scale responses appropriately (by using time and direction not just position)). It would also be very useful to have a micro device component that monitored the state of the GPS system in C-SCAN to provide a ‘heads’ up when it decides to go off with the pixies.
A device that superbly detects 3-D acceleration from changing movement is insufficient for navigation unless accompanied by suitably accurate and detailed gravity maps. Imagine navigating the canyons of Manhattan with such a device, or the Rockies, Northwest coast. Imagine a boomer gliding by a mid-ocean ridge. Heavy rainfall, large ocean waves, heavy rainfall; ice floes and icebergs, container and cruise ships, etc. will all have perturbing inconstant gravitational signatures for nearby devices, hence cumulative errors. OK for an afternoon walk, less so given four months deeply submerged then an ICBM launch.
Combing gyroscopic and atomic inertial guidance is not good enough. Wearing two watches tells you at least one is wrong. You will need three of each for quorum sensing. Adding GPS and/or Russian GLONASS fails during times of conflict when signals may be unavailable, purposely degraded, or orbital hardware destroyed.
We began with crude but robust methodology (physical maps) requiring user intelligence for interpretation. We now have subtle technologies requiring no user interpretation at all – and utterly vulnerable to central or adventitious hacking. How much can you trust others’ assurances when there is advantage to be gained by the other sides?