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There are so many problems with this article. If an area is so "remote" it doesn't have GPS coverage, the Google Maps imagery quality is going to be garbage as

There are so many problems with this article. If an area is so "remote" it doesn't have GPS coverage, the Google Maps imagery quality is going to be garbage as well. It claims it works day or night but how does it work at night? Not only will detail from the camera be reduced but the available satellite imagery will be greatly reduced in detail as well. If the team has only conducted a simulated flight isn't the headline just plain wrong? Maybe I missed it in the article but does the processing take place on the drone or at a control station?

alx_the_new_guy 3y ago
>if the area is so "remote" it doesn't have GPS coverage Or if GPS signal is being jammed. >imagery quality is going to be garbage Presumably, this relies on fairly limited compute resources, so it maybe probably downscales the image from it's camera to something like 256x256. Also, for machine vision stuff, too detailed an image can produce a lot of noise, so you'd need to pass it through some kind of low-pass filter anyway.
thinkingemote 3y ago
GPS is calculated from signals from a range of satellites far above us in orbit in space. It's not like cellular towers with coverage. There are no real remote areas with GPS - some areas and times of day will have less satellites overhead so calculating a position will be harder. There's more and more of these satellites (from usa, russian, eu, china etc) and modern chips will try calculate position from the signals from many of them rather than one "species" But yes, remote areas will have less mapping imagery quality because they are remote and uninteresting and don't have roads or people or companies to buy ads on the map. They will buy cheaper imagery in remote areas.