Environment

GNSS Hotspots | April 2009

One of 12 magnetograms recorded at Greenwich Observatory during the Great Geomagnetic Storm of 1859

1996 soccer game in the Midwest, (Rick Dikeman image)

Nouméa ground station after the flood

A pencil and a coffee cup show the size of NASA’s teeny tiny PhoneSat

Bonus Hotspot: Naro Tartaruga AUV

Pacific lamprey spawning (photo by Jeremy Monroe, Fresh Waters Illustrated)

“Return of the Bucentaurn to the Molo on Ascension Day”, by (Giovanni Antonio Canal) Canaletto

The U.S. Naval Observatory Alternate Master Clock at 2nd Space Operations Squadron, Schriever AFB in Colorado. This photo was taken in January, 2006 during the addition of a leap second. The USNO master clocks control GPS timing. They are accurate to within one second every 20 million years (Satellites are so picky! Humans, on the other hand, just want to know if we’re too late for lunch) USAF photo by A1C Jason Ridder.

Detail of Compass/ BeiDou2 system diagram

Hotspot 6: Beluga A300 600ST

1. LAYING DOWN THE LAW
Albany, New York;
Madison, Wisconsin
√ In May, the New York Court of Appeals ruled 4 to 3 that warrantless GPS surveillance isn’t legal. Oregon and Washington courts agree. Meanwhile, a Wisconsin appeals court panel ok’d secret police use of a GPS tracking device, because it didn’t involve search or seizure. Wonder when the Feds will chime in…

1. LAYING DOWN THE LAW
Albany, New York;
Madison, Wisconsin
√ In May, the New York Court of Appeals ruled 4 to 3 that warrantless GPS surveillance isn’t legal. Oregon and Washington courts agree. Meanwhile, a Wisconsin appeals court panel ok’d secret police use of a GPS tracking device, because it didn’t involve search or seizure. Wonder when the Feds will chime in…

2. BACKUP
Washington, DC
√ The land-based radio navigation system, Loran-C and its eLoran modernization, has been cut from the 2010 federal budget. Key members of the Senate’s Homeland Security and Science and Transportation committees —  worried about the GAO’s report on a faltering GPS — question killing an interoperable but independent PNT backup.

3. GNSS FOR AFRICA
Trieste, Italy
√ 50 scientists from 15 sub-Saharan universities consulted with GNSS experts — and even built LEGO Mindstorm robots — at the first Satellite Navigation and Technology for Africa workshop in April. Why? GNSS infrastructure means better maps, safer transportation, managed natural resources and food supplies, improved emergency services — major goals on the continent.

4. PAY TO PLAY
Moscow, Russia
√ The head of Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, has asked the government to make it prohibitively expensive to import cars that can’t use GLONASS. Business newspaper Vedomosti said not many Russian cars have built-in navigation systems now, and only 10,000 of nearly two million imports can use the Russian GNSS.

5. READY TO GO?
Thiruvananthapuram, India
√ In just three years, says the director of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), India’s Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS) will be up and running, delivering 10 meter accuracy to the subcontinent using three GEOs and four IGSO satellites. Could be the precursor to a full-fledged Indian GNSS.

6. L5: A MIXED BAG
Middle Earth Orbit
√ The GPS satellite carrying the new “safety-of-life” civil signal is under investigation. An L5 signal transmitted on April 10 was healthy. But signals on the L1 frequency are not meeting spec. Larger than expected pseudorange errors, says the GPS Wing’s chief engineer. The L5 signal itself could be a cause.

Hope beyond the Hype

A large body of research recognizes personal mobility as the primary future market for global navigation satellite systems in terms of the number of users and potential revenue. This expectation is especially strong for the upcoming European satellite navigation system Galileo, for which location-based service (LBS) applications have a prominent place in market research.

A large body of research recognizes personal mobility as the primary future market for global navigation satellite systems in terms of the number of users and potential revenue. This expectation is especially strong for the upcoming European satellite navigation system Galileo, for which location-based service (LBS) applications have a prominent place in market research.

However, the past decade has seen many GNSS manufacturers and would-be service providers disappointed by the persistent failure of a profitable LBS mass market to emerge and grow rapidly. With the notable exception of a few national markets, particularly in Asia, this failure to thrive has stemmed from a combination of technical, legal, business, and market conditions that have thwarted development of widespread consumer LBS applications.

Previous GNSS activities in the field of LBS have primarily succeeded in commercial and professional applications (such as vehicle tracking and fleet management or remote monitoring of former prisoners out on probation or parole) or for safety and security purposes, such as emergency services. These are applications for which requirements can more easily be pinned down and where revenue streams are easier to estimate and project.

Moreover, regulatory activities and legal mandates have stimulated some large-scale uptake of GNSS technology— such as the U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s E-911 mandate, which requires automatic location identification capability be made available to aid emergency callers using mobile phones.

Despite this slow start, the LBS mass market definitely holds the potential for providing substantial revenue streams. However, its development remains rather difficult to predict. This article will present some of the leading prospective consumer application markets for LBS, examine the leading causes of the still sporadic adoption of LBS in these mass markets, and describe efforts to mitigate the current technical limitations constraining the growth of consumer-driven LBS.

In particular, on this latter point we will consider assisted-GNSS (A-GNSS) technology that uses information — typically, satellite ephemerides and constellation almanac — provided through the communications network infrastructure. We also address the possibility of combining various non-satellite-based positioning technologies with GNSS to provide the quality of service needed to support large-scale development and adoption of LBSs.

. . .

The LBS market has the potential to provide huge benefits to consumers. However, LBS needs to overcome technical and market obstacles before it can achieve the growth rates long predicted by market analyses. The AGILE project seeks to overcome these limitations by defining market drivers for LBS applications and, as detailed in this paper, to mitigate current technical limitations by combining various positioning technologies that can provide the quality of service needed to enable LBS.

(For the rest of this story, please download the complete article using the PDF link above.)

Unmanned Air Vehicles

Once we tried to Google “UAV” and got more than two million citations on the Internet.

Try to find the definition of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and you’ll uncover a welter of choices in the literature. So, let’s just say that a UAV is an aerial vehicle capable of sustained flight without the need for a human operator onboard.

Once we tried to Google “UAV” and got more than two million citations on the Internet.

Try to find the definition of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and you’ll uncover a welter of choices in the literature. So, let’s just say that a UAV is an aerial vehicle capable of sustained flight without the need for a human operator onboard.

Although unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are mostly used in military applications nowadays, the UAVs can also perform such scientific, public safety, and commercial tasks as data and image acquisition of disaster areas, map building, communication relays, search and rescue, traffic surveillance, and so on.

A UAV can be remotely controlled, semi-autonomous, autonomous, or a combination of these, capable of performing as many tasks as you can imagine, including saving your life. Nowadays, UAVs perform a variety of tasks in both military and civil/commercial markets. Indeed, many different types of UAVs exist with different capabilities responding to different user needs.

The purpose of this column is to give the reader an overview of the large number of existing UAV systems and R&D projects as well as the practical challenges facing UAV designers and applications.

. . .

Conclusions

A surprising and seemingly vast number of different types of UAVs exist in the literature, with different capabilities responding to different user needs. We have reviewed the four main categories: MAV/Mini UAVs; Tactical UAVs; Strategic and special task UAVS. MAV/mini UAVs represent the smallest class of UAVs and are mostly used for civil applications. Strategic UAVs are the largest and mostly used in military applications. Although the tactical and strategic UAVs are the more used, in the meantime MAVs and Mini UAVs will become more practical and prevalent.

Different kinds of UAV platforms have different mission and applications. For instance, most research institute prefers rotary wing UAVs with vertical take off and landing capacities as test platforms for demonstrating their research subjects. International competitions such as the Aerial Robotic competition organized by AUVSI are very important, not only as a good way to promote and share research results but also to understand what is going on in the field of UAVs.

As we said before, it is unreasonable to know all the ins and outs of UAVs. That is why one can say: Once we tried to “Google” UAV, we are still Googling UAV,” and . . . we haven’t found the end yet!

(For the rest of this story, please download the complete article using the PDF link above.)