The centimeter limit is an engineering heuristic used by people combining high-precision GPS, LIDAR, remote sensing, and sometimes other sensors to build high-p

The centimeter limit is an engineering heuristic used by people combining high-precision GPS, LIDAR, remote sensing, and sometimes other sensors to build high-precision models of the world e.g. maps for autonomous systems. LIDAR alone can routinely detect changes in relative local surface geometry in excess of a centimeter across a day in practice. Autonomous driving typically uses an error bound of around 10 cm on absolute positioning even though the sensors used to determine that positioning often have sub-centimeter precision, for similar reasons. Real-time localization is an interesting problem because measurement with orthogonal sensor modalities can produce conflicting results with differences greater than the nominal precision of those positioning algorithms. Getting the last few centimeters of functional precision out of contradictory measurements is one of the things you need AI for. I agree that parts of the world have repeatable measurements below 1cm if you can account for the myriad effects that cause displacement, but others do not. The models are also approximate, since some effects require real-time measurement of things we do not have real-time measurements for, or which are not practically available in contexts where local position needs to be determined.