The future of GPS
opensignal.com
The future of GPS
1–10 of 46 posts
Re: The future of GPS
#2The paper: "Energy Efficient GPS Sensing with Cloud Offloading"
http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/172624/SenSys147-co-gps.p...
Re: The future of GPS
#31.5 years of continuous GPS tracking with just 2AA batteries - opens up some scary possibilities.
Re: The future of GPS
#4The key line in this article: "The disadvantage with this is that you wouldn’t get your location in real-time – it’s processed later."
The viability of this seems tied to how long 'later' is. Most consumer uses of GPS require quick response times or you'll see a huge dropoff in usage.
Re: The future of GPS
#5The key line in this article: "The disadvantage with this is that you wouldn’t get your location in real-time – it’s processed later." The viability of this seems tied to how long 'later' is. Most consumer uses of GPS require quick response times or you'll see a huge dropoff in usage.
But for a lot of purposes – e.g. tracking the locations of animal migration, this could be a huge development.
This is where it would really come into its own. From what I've worked out in the past, best-case for battery life today for trackers is to record a coordinate roughly every 4 hours and sleep. Longer than 4 hours, and you have to do a cold lock, which as discussed takes significantly longer. With my GPS unit, this translated to around 3-6 months of battery life with 1000mAh capacity, depending on how good you are at optimizing power.
Re: The future of GPS
#6So I've worked in this space before (realtime GPS tracking for a Fortune 100) - reducing GPS battery drain is great...but getting the signal back to 'The Cloud' (ie cellular) to be processed is what sucks.
And if you do barf out the data via cellular and are in cahoots with your cellular provider - you get tower information that helps estimate/verify location. But again, all of this eats away at whatever savings from being impatient with the GPS signal.
With cellular and a modern LiPo, the battery life is, at best, measured in weeks.
The 'Future' of GPS will come ~2015 when the last of the 'GPS Block-IIIA' satellites are in orbit and we move from 50bps to 500,000bps. [1]
Re: The future of GPS
#7The key line in this article: "The disadvantage with this is that you wouldn’t get your location in real-time – it’s processed later." The viability of this seems tied to how long 'later' is. Most consumer uses of GPS require quick response times or you'll see a huge dropoff in usage.
Yes, for products we usually think of us consumer GPS products such as phones and navigation units this won't change much--unless you're willing to listen to your navigation unit's voice yelling at you to make a U-turn onto that road you drove by four hours ago.
On the other hand, this will open up new uses for GPS and potentially let you utilize it in a range of applications that just need to record time/position instead of immediately report it to an app/user. In exchange for lack of immediacy, users acquire higher fidelity data. I'm expecting to see this be more relevant in scientific fields than consumer electronics.
Re: The future of GPS
#8It looks like this is actually the strategy that Memoto is doing with its life logging camera, which makes perfect sense in that use case: save battery by offloading the geotagging math to the server.
Re: The future of GPS
#9So I've worked in this space before (realtime GPS tracking for a Fortune 100) - reducing GPS battery drain is great...but getting the signal back to 'The Cloud' (ie cellular) to be processed is what sucks. And if you do barf out the data via cellular and are in cahoots with your cellular provider - you get tower information that helps estimate/verify location. But again, all of this eats away at whatever savings from…
If we're talking animal tracking, as the author mentioned as a possible use case, could the data be stored on-chip and processed upon recovery? I imagine that would handily beat out any cloud-based processing in terms of battery life, but of course assumes that we only eventually want the data.
Re: The future of GPS
#10The key line in this article: "The disadvantage with this is that you wouldn’t get your location in real-time – it’s processed later." The viability of this seems tied to how long 'later' is. Most consumer uses of GPS require quick response times or you'll see a huge dropoff in usage.
At the very least, I'd love to be able to put my handheld GPS receiver into a low-power "track-only" mode for the times when I'm not actually checking my coordinates. This would also be a nice thing to have integrated into fitness gadgets given that it wouldn't require massively increasing battery size.