4 ms·
> What we need, and will probably get soon, is inertial guidance based on laser ring or fibre optic gyros in mobiles. You get a location fix every week or so an
by maym86 8y ago
> What we need, and will probably get soon, is inertial guidance based on laser ring or fibre optic gyros in mobiles. You get a location fix every week or so and it starts out much more accurate than gps.
Corrections every week? This isn't possible given the drift rates of high end FOG or Lazer ring IMUs. A high-end marine-grade INS can cost over 1 million dollars. These systems will typically provide un-aided navigation solution drifts that are less than 1.8 km per day. This means that if the device were left stationary for one day, due to slight errors in the sensors and imperfect sensor calibrations, after integrating the position solution, the calculated position after one day would be 1800 meters away from the sensors actual position.
With ones that you can affordably put in a phone within minutes the drift will be huge. You need something to regularly correct for the drift and currently this is GPS.
- thermodynthrway 8y agoFibre optic gyros can be miniturized to millimeter dimension, if it wasn't for ITAR. High end civilian IMU's typically use mechanical gyros which have been obsolete for decades. Also, a phone isn't typically moving constantly like the oceans so error rates would be lower.
- maym86 8y agoThis is drift for a "static" million dollar marine grade (i.e. highest grade we currently have) INS not in the ocean or moving. Drift is measured in non-moving conditions. These are the fiber optic and laser sytems you are referring to. Even if we could make that cheap and small enough it would still need regular corrections far more frequently than a week to be as good as a GPS is now.
- thermodynthrway 8y agoYou might be right but I have doubts. Most weapons are INS guided despite the long fly times of cruise missiles etc. ITAR has a massive chilling effect on development, I wouldn't be surprised if we had error rates of less than a meter a day in mobiles if development wasn't severely curtailed
- azernik 8y agoCruise missiles combine (using Tomahawk as an example) GPS, visual terrain-matching, radar terrain-matching, and INS. Because they know INS needs those constant corrections.
- wahern 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERCOM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERCOM
- ohazi 8y agoDrift is over a given time, not distance. Missiles generally have an very short fly time, even if they're going really far.
- azernik 8y agoCruise missiles are very different from (quasi-)ballistic or anti-aircraft missiles - they fly at subsonic speeds at low altitudes (usually using a turbojet) to avoid interception. For example, the classic Tomahawk flies at ~900km/h, with the long-range variants having a range of 2500km, giving a maximum flight time on the order of hours, and so a pure INS drift on the order of low hundreds of meters.
- dschuler 8y agoThis works the other way - you get to prove your assertion that inertial navigation could work with cheap miniaturized sensors. Anyone can cast a doubt without proof. If your acceleration sensor is off by 1 part per million, 9.8 m/s^2 (i.e. gravity) will turn into a positioning error of ~73km in one day.
- rdtsc 8y ago> Most weapons are INS guided despite the long fly times of cruise missiles etc. And because of a long fly time or imprecise initial reference point (a submarine is floating) some do corrections. One of the coolest one for ICBMs is to use celestial navigation to correct errors. They'd have a window with a camera and would "look" for a few stars.
- 8y ago
- c22 8y agoYou could use some smart heuristics to make corrections without a gps lock, like resetting the location to "home" if it is near enough and sits motionless over night, or making an adjustment whenever the location drifts too far from the known locations of currently connected cell towers.
- maym86 8y agoYou won't get close to GPS accuracy with these. The uncertainty from cell tower triangulation is huge (relatively). But yes, some kind of beacon that works like GPS on a local scale or detection of known mapped landmarks could be used for corrections but there are issues with these too. These could assist GPS location rather than replace it entirely.
- c22 8y ago> These could assist GPS location rather than replace it entirely. Of course, that was the proposal. There's more datapoints if you're willing to get creative, wifi networks (already used for this), cooperative comparison with other mobile devices in a local meshnet, acoustic cues from the environment, machine analysis of captured images, etc. Obviously dead reckoning without gps is going to require a multi-pronged approach.
- maym86 8y ago> cooperative comparison with other mobile devices in a local meshnet Please explain how this will work?
- natosaichek 8y agoI could imagine a secure location service that allows your phone to compare its current expected position with other nearby phones' expectations of their positions. If it's over bluetooth or wifi, the positions should be within meters of each other. This could provide an input to a kalmann filter type position estimator to help reduce drift as you (for example) walk down the street.
- ixf 8y agoNot sure what IMUs you're using, but we've been using civilian MEMS and FOG IMUs for years now. You still can't make anything purely inertial good enough to keep position accurately enough to be a GPS replacement for more than a few hours.
- kqr 8y agoSo this is why my smartwatch can tell me my speed before it has a GPS lock, including indoors? Very cool! But of course, as you say, the reports of my absolute position are very inaccurate.
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- maym86 8y agoVelocity can come from dopplar shift of the GPS carrier frequencies. This is very accurate. An IMU can be used for walking speed estimation but it won't be as accurate using a human gait model or direct integration.
- TickleSteve 8y agoNo, any position-solution produced before a GPS lock will be due to the approximation produced by either using the last-known position or the cell-tower triangulation. That information is also used as a seed for the GPS lock to speed up the time-to-fix.
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- monort 8y agoAccording to the paper, one nautical mile per day was state of the art in 2006. They are shooting for one mile/month now https://link.springer.com/article/10.1134/S207510871401009X https://link.springer.com/article/10.1134/S207510871401009X
- maym86 8y agoThanks I'm interested to take a look in detail. From the abstract > In 2006, we presented at DGON symposium in Stuttgart [2] the design and navigation results of MARINS, the first FOG-based navigation system within the class of 1 nautical mile per day. This navigation system in now in production... > have we reached the limits of the technology or can we still improve the performance of our sensors? > Of course, the present FOG design is not good enough for the required performance, even in a strictly controlled environment. This is a discussion of how it could be improved not what is available in production and certainly not close to being available within a phone - which was the original point.
- cryptonector 8y agoPlus the gyros would have to be powered at all times -- that's not gonna work on mobiles.