DARPA has been funding work on better gyros and accelerometers for about 10 years now. MEMS gyros keep getting better. The good ones are down to a few degrees per hour.[1] That IMU/GPS is $3,386.09. Not down to the phone/vacuum cleaner price point yet. This is nowhere near as good as the device described in the parent article, but it's good enough for a lot of applications. If you can get a GPS fix every few minutes,…
The [1] link seems to need a matching query string:
GPS is trivial to jam. Any exotic IMU has huge defense implications. Being able to miniaturize it would be a big deal.
I thought so for a long time, but then learned about spread-spectrum and frequency-hopping (with cryptographically randomized pattern) radio communication techniques which are employed in military-grade communications, and suddenly reliably jamming GPS without jamming literally everything becomes very hard.
That's great for radios, but I wasn't aware GPS satellites employed this technology in their transmitted beacons.
The innovation here appear to be the chamber. (caveat: I still need to read the paper). A few thoughts follow. They are going for a UHV***, probably Still a lot of other work to do though. I see a table full of optics to make the MOT*. Also see a pair of anti-Helmholtz coils for the magnetic field. They could maybe replace those coils (which probably drive a few amps) with permanent magnets (assuming they don't need…
Does passive pumping mean a chamber full of baked zeolite or something that's then chilled to adsorb all the gas? I guess I should read the paper too, but I don't have a copy.
Or even without the chilling. CRT televisions had zeolite as vacuum pump as well.
They kept vacuum for up to decades.
DARPA has been funding work on better gyros and accelerometers for about 10 years now. MEMS gyros keep getting better. The good ones are down to a few degrees per hour.[1] That IMU/GPS is $3,386.09. Not down to the phone/vacuum cleaner price point yet. This is nowhere near as good as the device described in the parent article, but it's good enough for a lot of applications. If you can get a GPS fix every few minutes,…
GPS is trivial to jam. Any exotic IMU has huge defense implications. Being able to miniaturize it would be a big deal.
> GPS is trivial to jam.
Not as trivial as jamming detection and countermeasures, so simple that it has found its way into base model commercial components. If you are in the air: use directional antennas - why are you listening to the ground? If you are on the ground: you get an easy 30deg arc pointing to the hostile transmitter... put a building or terrain between it and you.
I thought so for a long time, but then learned about spread-spectrum and frequency-hopping (with cryptographically randomized pattern) radio communication techniques which are employed in military-grade communications, and suddenly reliably jamming GPS without jamming literally everything becomes very hard.
That's great for radios, but I wasn't aware GPS satellites employed this technology in their transmitted beacons.
GPS does use Spread Spectrum for its navigation beacons.
I would think camera-based navigation would be fairly successful at this point. We can easily store large amounts of image and terrain data, and deep learning based image recognition systems are quite powerful. I would think that by limiting your image search space based on your likely position would make the problem even easier to solve. Terrain based navigation is certainly nothing new(1950s?), so there is probably…
> I would think camera-based navigation would be fairly successful at this point. We can easily store large amounts of image and terrain data, and deep learning based image recognition systems are quite powerful. Aside from the fact that the amount of data required for that would be orders of magnitudes larger than you can reasonably store, that wouldn't work at all in areas with little terrain features like deserts…
It’s certainly conceivable that you could store a compressed representation of the image features. Especially if you’re operating in a more limited environment (e.g. a large metro area), it would be very feasible to only store extracted features from the image data that you could use for matching.
This reminds me of a spacecraft navigation system that employed an almost perfect sphere, that floated inside the centre of chamber that employed a detection system that corrected the spacecrafts direction to keep the sphere in the centre of the chamber. On the drawings it was referred to as the space crafts "consciousness" Unfortunately i cannot find any reference to it anywhere.
GPS is trivial to jam. Any exotic IMU has huge defense implications. Being able to miniaturize it would be a big deal.
I thought so for a long time, but then learned about spread-spectrum and frequency-hopping (with cryptographically randomized pattern) radio communication techniques which are employed in military-grade communications, and suddenly reliably jamming GPS without jamming literally everything becomes very hard.
I'm literally experiencing GPS jamming when I'm driving my car near president palace. Like one second I'm moving on road and next second I'm jumping to random places few hundred meters away until I passed long enough. Navigator sometimes goes crazy because of that. So at least civilian GPS is possible to jam.
I thought so for a long time, but then learned about spread-spectrum and frequency-hopping (with cryptographically randomized pattern) radio communication techniques which are employed in military-grade communications, and suddenly reliably jamming GPS without jamming literally everything becomes very hard.
I'm literally experiencing GPS jamming when I'm driving my car near president palace. Like one second I'm moving on road and next second I'm jumping to random places few hundred meters away until I passed long enough. Navigator sometimes goes crazy because of that. So at least civilian GPS is possible to jam.
Well the US Govt is the “owner” of the protocol, they must be able to dos something about it.
The innovation here appear to be the chamber. (caveat: I still need to read the paper). A few thoughts follow. They are going for a UHV***, probably Still a lot of other work to do though. I see a table full of optics to make the MOT*. Also see a pair of anti-Helmholtz coils for the magnetic field. They could maybe replace those coils (which probably drive a few amps) with permanent magnets (assuming they don't need…
HackerNews amazes me with how for nearly any topic there will be deep expertise in the thread. Thank you for sharing
The OP seems to know something, but I wouldn't go as far as taking the comment above as coming from an "expert"... the fact they feel confident to make recommendations about improvements on the chamber without even reading the paper actually tells me they are just armchair expert.