Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The future of GPS

opensignal.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 46 posts

Re: The future of GPS

#11

Post by devicenull »

stevenrace wrote: post #6

So 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…

Is this going to require new GPS receivers? I don't really see it addressed on the wikipedia page.

Re: The future of GPS

#12

Post by stevenrace »

devicenull wrote: post #11
stevenrace wrote: post #6

So 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…

Is this going to require new GPS receivers? I don't really see it addressed on the wikipedia page.

Yup, it operates on a new range of frequencies.

Re: The future of GPS

#13

Post by StavrosK »

marcusdoran wrote: post #4

The 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.

From the article, it seems to me that "later" is "when you get an Internet connection".

Re: The future of GPS

#14

Post by StavrosK »

tgb wrote: post #9
stevenrace wrote: post #6

So 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.

From what I understood, that's exactly what the paper proposes. You store the raw data, and only correlate it with the ephemeris later. I don't know why the author involved the cloud into it, it sounds like it can be done very easily on any Internet-connected device.

Re: The future of GPS

#15

Post by stevenrace »

tgb wrote: post #9
stevenrace wrote: post #6

So 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.

Sure, but even in the domain of animal tracking I imagine very few cases involve capturing the animals afterwards. That seems labor intensive (and prone to biting, scratching, etc).

If 'afterwards' is when it hits a certain geofence or known network - you still are still stuck with waking up the device and querying the network interface...or doing some non-C friendly code to interpret a geofence coordinate.

Re: The future of GPS

#16

Post by bathat »

devicenull wrote: post #11
stevenrace wrote: post #6

So 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…

Is this going to require new GPS receivers? I don't really see it addressed on the wikipedia page.

Using the new L2C signal will require a new receiver, but the current L1 (C/A) signal will continue to be broadcast. So you will not need a new receiver to continue the same level of service.

Re: The future of GPS

#17

Post by Xcelerate »

I don't think the future is GPS at all. I remember reading a while back about a researcher who was working on developing tiny optical gyroscopes that were ridiculously precise, the idea being that you can calibrate their position once and after that all future locations are determined simply by integrating the acceleration of the gyroscope. It would work in places that GPS can't (like caves).

To me, that's really awesome. Personally, I think the coolest use would be in running watches to finally get a perfectly accurate pace instead of a slowly-updating estimate.

I'll see if I can find the link to the researcher's page.

Re: The future of GPS

#18

Post by Benferhat »

Xcelerate wrote: post #17

I don't think the future is GPS at all. I remember reading a while back about a researcher who was working on developing tiny optical gyroscopes that were ridiculously precise, the idea being that you can calibrate their position once and after that all future locations are determined simply by integrating the acceleration of the gyroscope. It would work in places that GPS can't (like caves). To me, that's really awe…

That can synergize with GPS. Many OEM Nav systems in cars these days do something similar in tunnels, where GPS signals are unavailable.

Re: The future of GPS

#19

Post by shabble »

I suspect that eventually we're going to start integrating chip-scale atomic clocks[1] into our mobile devices, which will allow a much longer synchronisation period. Right now they're still ~35g and ~130mW power, but that's only going down. There's going to be a whole bunch of interesting new distributed processing stuff you can do with highly accurate synchronised nodes; something like the Google Spanner system on a more local scale, perhaps.

[1] http://www.symmetricom.com/products/frequency-references/chi...

Re: The future of GPS

#20

Post by Xcelerate »

Benferhat wrote: post #18
Xcelerate wrote: post #17

I don't think the future is GPS at all. I remember reading a while back about a researcher who was working on developing tiny optical gyroscopes that were ridiculously precise, the idea being that you can calibrate their position once and after that all future locations are determined simply by integrating the acceleration of the gyroscope. It would work in places that GPS can't (like caves). To me, that's really awe…

That can synergize with GPS. Many OEM Nav systems in cars these days do something similar in tunnels, where GPS signals are unavailable.

But if gyroscopes became precise enough, I can't think of a reason for needing GPS anymore, can you?
Post reply on HN