November 7, 2005
Positioning Improvement goings on at Stanford
Per Enge, professor in the Aero/Astro department at Stanford, is heading up a new interdisciplinary group to improve positioning technology down to centimeter level accuracies. They hope to have a follow-on to GPS in 15 years or so.
A group of Stanford University academics wants to make such navigation so accurate that it could tell whether you are in your car or standing next to it.
Since the government first launched a satellite navigation system known as the global positioning system (GPS) in 1978, the system's ability to pinpoint the location of an object has steadily improved.
GPS receivers used to be bigger than a brick a decade ago and were accurate to within about 100 meters. Today a handheld $100 GPS receiver can fix a point on the ground within five or 10 meters, while more expensive military systems can zero in on the receiver within five meters or fewer.
But the GPS system doesn't get much better than that, and it doesn't work indoors or in deep urban canyons where a target object isn't within the line of sight of two or more satellites. And it isn't that hard to jam GPS signals.
Such a system isn't good enough for James Spilker and Per Enge, who are among the founders of the Stanford Center for Position, Navigation and Time. Spilker, a founder of navigation-chip startup Rosum and one of the creators of GPS, believes satellite navigation is just in its infancy.
"Technologies are coming to the forefront that will impact billions of people and millions of businesses," Spilker said. "Our humble goal is to create the top-ranked university center in the world for this realm of technology."
The interdisciplinary research center wants to create a navigation system capable of locating objects within one centimeter, or less than half an inch. The center hopes to achieve that goal within the next 20 years.
As they say, read the whole thing.
Posted by elkaim at November 7, 2005 7:53 PM