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dan_bgblue
11-30-2012, 06:29 PM
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2012/11/30/better-than-gps-bae-navsop/

dethbylt
12-02-2012, 10:42 AM
With this admittedly not being the full story, I find it hard to believe the accuracy is as good as advertised. The key component to triangulation (or trilateration) is knowing the exact location of the source signal. WiFi hotspots are approximate navigation systems, whereas GPS is exact (as exact as possible). The margin of error for a system that would periodically work entirely without GPS precision puts it outside government applications - unless I am missing a key concept. It is a great idea though. We certainly need to replace, harden, or better protect our GPS.

CitizenBBN
12-02-2012, 04:03 PM
dethbylt that's my confusion as well. I love the concept and see it as a great addition to having the most advanced satellite guidance as possible, but would be leery of having it be the primary solution.

First there aren't a lot of wifi hotspots in Afghanistan. Or radio or TV or anything else. Second I don't see how it can be so hyper accurate if you don't know the exact source of that wifi router or radio broadcast.

Should definitely be deployed as a part of the overall package, as should the research being done in intelligent topology reading where the computer can recognize the truck or the hill or the building adaptively, but we sure shouldn't move away from satellites just yet.

IMO the most promising long term research is in magnetic positioning. That's how the most advanced animals seem to work. whatever birds are doing to travel 2,000 miles to the exact same pond every year between Canada and Costa Rica blows everything we have out of the water. The biggest problem there is potentially jamming it.

Ideally it uses them all. reads the topology, follows GPS, looks for other signals, reads magnetics and reaches a conclusion within a confidence interval. Outside the confidence interval maybe a missile it self destructs rather than impact, but at 99% confidence you blast the target.

Very interesting research. Like deth, I'm really confused how you use a wifi hotspot b/c you'd think you'd need to somehow determine the origin point for the signal. I could see getting its direction of course, but you'd have to determine distance without a 2nd reference point unless you had multiple of these devices all mapping interactively.

Glad we're working on it though. Our ability to send unmanned weaponry into battle is the future of our force projection.

PedroDaGr8
12-04-2012, 10:31 PM
This technology isn't something new, the only new addition is the use of things like radio towers. Most of your smart phones have been using wifi to augment positioning since google rolled it out years ago. In fact before that, even cell towers were also used to augment and improve GPS positioning. The modern smartphone uses all three. The next step on smart phones will be to add in Glonass and Galileo capabilities and you can get really good triangulation. I think the biggest use for the radio and what not isn't just in getting a position but by using multiple location data streams you can prevent simple hijacking of the gps stream. Something that is not nearly as hard to do as you would think.