Key data including time, date, and GNSS coordinates will be sent to the Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) and then relayed to the most appropriate emergency service. The eCall is triggered by airbag deployment and impact sensor information.

eCall is the European Union (EU) initiative aimed at reducing road casualties by increasing the speed and efficiency of emergency response. It involves a device installed in cars that will automatically dial the EU’s “112” emergency phone number in the event of a serious road accident.

Key data including time, date, and GNSS coordinates will be sent to the Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) and then relayed to the most appropriate emergency service. The eCall is triggered by airbag deployment and impact sensor information.

The European Commission has adopted measures to ensure a fully functional eCall service throughout the EU by 2015. These measures establish, for instance, requirements for PSAPs, EU-wide interoperability, and continuity of the service.

According to a Commission working paper, the price of the in-vehicle system could be anywhere between €50 and €300 euros and would be rolled into the price of the vehicle. Challenges to overcome include human language issues, and of course “the EU problem” – getting everyone to agree and then actually doing it.

Public Not Private
But, wait a minute? Aren’t there already cars on the market that have this kind of built-in system? Didn’t Mercedes-Benz, for example, recently unveil its own in-vehicle emergency call feature? The system notifies a Mercedes-Benz call center when there’s a serious accident, which then contacts the emergency services, transmitting the precise location and other information within minutes.

The company claims the service, now available in nineteen European countries, is completely free of charge, “except for possible mobile phone charges.”

The point here is that the Mercedes-Benz system has to be linked to the driver’s or some one else’s mobile phone when the accident occurs. Other carmakers, such as Alfa Romeo, Porsche, and BMW, offer similar systems, mostly in higher-end luxury models.

Rasmus Lindholm, director of partnership and communications at Brussels-based industry association ERTICO, says, “The Mercedes, Volvo, and other systems are similar to eCall, but they involve a private service. Their emergency message is sent via your cell phone to a private call center and then another message is relayed to the emergency services. They do not provide full coverage across Europe nor the protection of a 112 emergency call.”

Lindholm adds, “eCall is different. It’s a public service, free at the point of use, just like a 112 call. It’s for everyone.”

HeEROic Effort
ERTICO is Europe’s intelligent transportation systems (ITS) organization, and is at the center of the development of eCall for Europe. Founded in 1991, the 100-member group serves as the project coordinator for HeERO, the Harmonized eCall European Pilot program.

Their idea seems to have caught on. Since January 2011, 15 European countries, under the HeERO 1 and HeERO 2 consortia, have been hard at work on the piloting and deployment of eCall: Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark Luxembourg, the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Romania, Spain, Sweden and Turkey.

Data from the first round of testing under HeERO 1, which took place in eight pilot sites, is now completed and has been analyzed in terms of 28 key performance indicators. These include length of time for a call to be connected, the success rate for the establishment of voice transmissions, the time taken for the vehicle identification number to be decoded, and length of time for the emergency response center to receive the minimum set of data from the vehicle, including key information such as its location.

eCall in-vehicle systems from a range of suppliers have been used in the tests, and trials with real live PSAPs has been undertaken in several of the pilot countries.

Cross-border interoperability was another key area for testing during 2012. As eCall will be a pan-European system, a central feature is that drivers benefit from the same service no matter where they are in the EU, with any voice or text communications carried out in their own language.

In a word, says the HeERO coordination team, the initial results have been “positive”. Of course, a number of technical issues have been brought to light and they will need to be resolved. But reports delivered at a recent HeERO meeting in Zagreb show that these are not the main barriers to eCall deployment. All of the technical problems identified in the first phase of testing can and will be resolved, they say.

The Only Real Problem
Despite the work of HeERO, which can be said to have already demonstrated the technical feasibility of the eCall concept, the most important remaining barrier to implementation is at the political level.

Although 22 of the 27 EU Member States have signed the eCall “Memorandum of Understanding,” as well as Croatia, Iceland, Switzerland, Norway and Turkey, and although work aimed at engaging the support of the remaining Member States is continuing, necessary PSAP upgrades to support the system are in some cases being delayed by political decisions at national level.

“It is evident that a lack of political will in some quarters is slowing progress towards eCall imple-mentation,” wrote one observer. What this means is that national governments are dragging their heels on eCall.

And why are they dragging their heels? Because they can.

In July 2012, a non-binding resolution expressing full support for the implementation of eCall across Europe was approved by an overwhelming majority in the Parliament, demonstrating a clear and strong will for pan-European eCall to be fully implemented in 2015.

So much for non-binding resolutions. What about a binding resolution?

The non-binding resolution calls on the European Commission (EC) to introduce legislation requiring EU Member States to upgrade their emergency response service infrastructure in order to be able to handle eCalls. That’s where eCall becomes mandatory. Member States will have to comply; so, any stalling until then will have been of no benefit to anyone.

Sounds pretty simple. Only the commission hasn’t introduced the legislation yet.

Just one among many who feel the same way, Jacob Bangsgaard is director-general of the International Automobile Association (FIA) Region I, a consumer body representing 106 motoring and touring clubs and their 36 million members from across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

In an interview with ERTICO, Bangsgaard said, “It’s now the European Commission’s turn to introduce legislation that will ensure that the emergency service infrastructure of Member States is ready for 2015.”

Indeed, it is up to the EC. And that has got to be making some people nervous.

We only need to go back a few weeks to find a perfect illustration of how the European Commission’s best laid plans can be scuppered once its sister institutions, the EU Parliament and the EU Council, are asked to join the party. For months we kept hearing about the imminent approval of the new EU GNSS Regulation. This is the document that will lay to rest the bickering over who gets to do what in the Galileo program.

Only thing was, and it was only the thing that no one seemed to mention, the regulation is closely tied to the Galileo future budget, which is tied to the commission’s overall budget, which the commission worked out in close consultation with the parliament, which the council had to approve.

Instead, the Council decided the Commission’s budget wasn’t good enough; so, they proposed a new budget, which they’ve now sent back to the parliament, which really liked the old budget and now has to approve the new budget.

And by this time, it didn’t look like the Parliament is in any mood to be friendly. Indeed, on March 13 Parliament overwhelmingly rejected the proposed budget of €960 billion.

The eCall people are hoping the clear and strong will for their program will be matched by a clear and strong willingness by all parties concerned to be agreeable.

A quick review of what the people who should know have been saying about the Commission’s eCall legislation shows some sources were predicting it would be done last December. Others, slightly more realistically, were saying January. Now, ERTICO is saying probably next summer.

“The Commission is in consultation,” says Lindholm. “There’s been a lot of back and forth with the Council.”

More Testing, Broadening Scope
Meanwhile, the real work moves forward. The HeERO Standardization Task Force met several times in 2012 to discuss — you guessed it — standards. Taking into account the results of ongoing testing, it has already proposed 25 changes to the published eCall standards and submitted these to the appropriate bodies.

The Task Force also organized an eCall interoperability testing event last June in the United Kingdom. Participants were able to monitor and assess new in-vehicle systems in conjunction with various PSAP configurations in a realistic testing environment.

All of this testing and assessing has not been confined to EU member and associated states. The Finnish HeERO pilot site, among others, has been working with GLONASS Union, the Russian nonprofit organization tasked with implementing Russia’s own similar emergency call system, “ERA-GLONASS.” Together, they have been testing the cross-border interoperability of the two systems.

With almost 1,400 kilometers (868 miles) of shared border with Russia, Finland is the ideal place to carry out such testing. In 2012, three Russian in-vehicle systems were tested in Finland. This year, Finnish systems will be tested in Russia, while the Russian systems will also be tested in other EU countries.

ERTICO, along with ITS Russia and GLONASS Union, has, for the last two years, been co-chairing the eCall/ERA-GLONASS Working Group. Its aim is the alignment of ERA-GLONASS and eCall standards and technical requirements, as well as the schedule for implementation.

Lindholm, who has been working closely with the Russians, explains the goal: “This means that when the eCall and ERA-GLONASS systems are operational, you should be able to drive anywhere in Europe and across Russia with access to the two emergency call systems.”

Like eCall, ERA-GLONASS will be multiconstellation in design, a point confirmed by the program’s Yaroslav Domaratsky at the ITS World Congress in Vienna last year.

The two systems are not identical. The Russians are looking at other services that could be included. Naturally, in all their presentations, they are linking their system to GLONASS — it’s in the name, ERA-GLONASS – just as the Europeans are linking their system to Galileo, even though eCall doesn’t need Galileo to work.

Speaking at the same event in Vienna, Fiammetta Diani, market development officer at the European GNSS Agency (GSA), reminded everyone, “Galileo will provide accuracy and reliability in all the transport markets, but in the case of emergency rapid assistance, the positioning need is even more critical.”

Further afield, just this past January, ERTICO and partners launched Japan’s first eCall testing facility, aimed at helping Japanese automakers meet the new eCall standards.

Gemalto, a Netherlands-based digital security firm, will provide the testing facility with its machine-to-machine automotive modules and machine identification modules, already compliant with European test cases, to enable communications and GPS positioning for all Japanese trials.

This will be the first eCall facility outside of Europe, allowing Japanese automakers to locally test in-car systems destined for the European market. The FUJITSU TEN and YRP test bed features Japan’s only exclusive eCall 2G cellular network, which simulates European wireless networks.

Full-Court Press
From the EU Emergency Services Workshop held in Riga last April, to the Berlin eCall Days in September and the eCall Technical Workshop in the UK in October, the HeERO initiative has been pulling out all the stops to see to it that eCall lives and breathes and that everyone knows about it. And it has managed to generate some interest.

With its official launch meeting in Madrid, Spain, on January 14, HeERO 2 brings the number of countries participating in the pilot trials up to 15, and ERTICO recently announced that five associated partner countries will participate at their own expense, while another five new countries are hoping to join in the first quarter of 2013.

Looking farther into the year, plans are in place to set up an eCall certification body, with many stakeholders said to have registered interest.

2013 will be the final year of the HeERO 1 initiative. HeERO 2 will run for two more years, extending the trials into the new pilot countries while widening the scope to include new vehicles such as large goods vehicles and powered two-wheeled vehicles. Thus, the two HeEROs will run in parallel throughout 2013 until the big HeERO Conference in Bucharest in November, where final results of the one and preliminary results of other will be presented.

By then, all are hoping that the famous eCall legislation will have made its way through the obstacle course that the EU institutions comprise, forcing the remaining nay-sayers to get on board and paving the way for a system that might just be worth its weight, and the wait, in saved lives.

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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. TIMING IS EVERYTHING
Washington, D.C.

1. TIMING IS EVERYTHING
Washington, D.C.
√ The Smithsonian’s long awaited permanent exhibit on GNSS and what led up to it, Time and Navigation: The Untold Story of Getting From Here to There, will open at the National Air and Space Museum on March 29. The takeaway: If you want to know where you are, you need an accurate clock.

Smithsonian Time and Navigation exhibit website

2. HEADACHES
New York USA
√ Oxycodone and other addictive pain relievers are so profitable for the rob-and-run crowd that New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly decided to try Purdue Pharma’s bait bottle technology in pharmacies. They will look just like the real thing—they’ll even rattle when shaken — but if you grab them off the shelf a GPS-aided tracking sensor awakens and . . . busted!

New York Times
[January 15] NYPD Looks to GPS Bottles to Combat Pill Bandits

3. UNDERWRITING
London, United Kingdom
√ London-based reinsurance broker Aon Benfield warns about the upcoming Solar Max and GNSS. Their January Geomagnetic Storms report says satellite orbit decay, satellite component damage, and high-latitude flight problems require new insurance products. But what about the premiums? “Accurate assessment of risk is still in its infancy,” they say. Let’s just wait while they figure out the cost of GNSS vulnerability.

Aon Benfield
[January 14] Geomagnetic storm report
launched to help prepare for potential peak in solar activity

4. BACKUP PLAN
Dover Strait, United Kingdom
√ In January, Lighthouse Authorities of Britain and Ireland (GLA) turned on e-Loran in the Dover Strait as a backup when GNSS is unavailable. Although the GLA said their main concern is mariner safety in the busiest shipping channel in the world, they added that eLoran might be terribly useful in other cases such as “telecommunciations, smart grid, and high frequency trading systems vulnerable to jamming.” Hint. Hint . . .

Trinity House (General Lighthouse Authority)
[January 8] UK switches on GPS backup in the English Channel

5. RHINO RESCUE
Nepal
Hand-launched and GPS-enabled FPV Raptor model planes make great game wardens. From 650 feet up, they film the ground below looking for rhino and tiger poachers and transmit location information back to law enforcement. Last year, the World Wildlife Fund gave 2 UAVs to Nepal to patrol Bardia National Park. In December, Google donated $5 million to expand the project to Africa.
World Wildlife Fund
New Technology to Fight Wildlife Crime
The promise of UAVs and applications on the ground (Video)

BONUS HOTSPOT!
ROBO TURTLE
Zurich, Switzerland
First they tried a tuna, but its narrow agile body made it difficult to robotize. Then students at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich looked at sea turtles and voila! The perfect model for autonomous underwater navigation and transport.

The naro-tartaruga is a 165-pound aluminum swimming robot with a top speed of about 6.6. feet per second. The two front flippers can be maneuvered in three dimensions underwater and the two rear flippers also aid with steering and propulsion. The rigid oval body is big enough to carry cargo and lots of regular-sized electronics and sensors – including pressure, temperature, water leakage and water flow sensors, along with gyros, surface GPS, a compass, and motor encoders.

Note the turtle fins in the picture above, which make all this maneuverability and speed possible. And, last but not least, a camera where the more traditional wrinkled head ought to be. (And, the 17 dual core processor offers a bit more oomph than a real turtle’s brain as well.)

Naro Tartaruga pool test

The Robotics Projects at ETH

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GNSS is in a class of its own and the positioning/navigation/timing (PNT) technology of choice for most applications. Why wouldn’t we always use it?

It is affordable, it is a mature technology with many form factors, and its level of performance spans several orders of magnitude — millimeters to meters. There are a bewildering number of permutations of user equipment, augmentation solutions, processing algorithms, and operational procedures to choose from.

However. . . .

GNSS is in a class of its own and the positioning/navigation/timing (PNT) technology of choice for most applications. Why wouldn’t we always use it?

It is affordable, it is a mature technology with many form factors, and its level of performance spans several orders of magnitude — millimeters to meters. There are a bewildering number of permutations of user equipment, augmentation solutions, processing algorithms, and operational procedures to choose from.

However. . . .

A number of well-known environments and operational scenarios exist in which GNSS signals cannot be tracked reliably. And these environments or scenarios are attracting the attention of those wishing to develop alternatives and backups to GNSS.

Conditions that are difficult or impossible for GNSS operations are experienced indoors or other occluded environments where the low-powered satellite signals are blocked or unreliable. Moreover, jamming and interference can degrade these signals and represent a continuing threat, given the widespread availability of so-called personal privacy devices (PPDs).

As PNT applications continue to expand strongly in consumer and commercial segments, demand is also growing for uninterrupted, ubiquitous, and seamless access to position/location information.

In this context, “seamless” refers to an ideal situation in which PNT capability is continuously available in all environments, indoors and outdoors. Achieving this will necessarily require a PNT technology mix that may be characterized as GNSS+.

To help us explore this issue further and assess the progress being made toward achieving ubiquitous positioning, we called on Dr. Chris Rizos, the head of the School of Surveying & Geospatial Engineering at the University of New South Wales, Australia. In the early 1990s Rizos established the Satellite Navigation and Positioning Lab at UNSW, an R&D group that focuses on GNSS and wireless positioning technology and applications.

Rizos’s current research includes new positioning technologies and he has written and spoken widely on the subject of ubiquitous positioning.

IGM: What are the leading non-GNSS sensor/positioning technologies today?

RIZOS: Undoubtedly the most mature non-GNSS sensors are the ones based on a package of several gyroscopes and accelerometers, perhaps including a magnetometer and/or barometer. We may refer to this package by the generic label of inertial navigation system or INS.

An INS can be very inexpensive (the components exist in smartphones), and due to the fact that no signal tracking is needed, INS can be very reliable. Inertial sensors cannot be interrupted in their operation by, for example, signal jammers.

GNSS and INS present a textbook example of complementary navigation technologies, such that the integration of GNSS/INS is a classical solution to the positioning availability challenge. Furthermore, INS can provide additional information on platform orientation — although unfortunately it cannot provide timing.

Even though INS does not suffer the vulnerabilities of GNSS signal non-availability/denial, it has its own weakness due to the growth in positioning errors over time. Hence, GNSS “updates” are required in order to regularly calibrate the INS sensor errors.

A “new” class of sensor technology that is finding ever-increasing application comes from the robotics community. This uses vision and/or laser scanning sensors to provide relative positioning information. Integration of these imaging or optical systems with GNSS will become very popular as intelligent road vehicles gain autonomous driving/navigation capabilities.

Positioning techniques based on “signals of opportunity” may also be considered very mature, but the accuracy/availability varies considerably. So, I won’t dwell on these. In fact, any RF signal of opportunity — WiFi, Bluetooth, RF identification/near field communications, cell phones, digital TV —can be used in a cell-ID mode of positioning and combined with GNSS.

IGM: Are there non-GNSS positioning technologies under development that appear likely to improve the options for integration with GNSS to support ubiquitous positioning?

RIZOS: Technological developments are occurring at a very fast pace. What drives cost down, and adaptation up, is large markets for non-GNSS solutions. Inertial navigation systems will improve in performance, but the rate of reduction in cost cannot be easily assessed, especially if the technology is largely restricted to military applications.

The “fast performer” is image-based technology, as the basic technology components can be manufactured at low cost, and a potentially huge market exists in personal, robotic, and vehicle applications. Note that both INS and image-based positioning solutions — neither can provide precise timing — do not require any external infrastructure, such as signal transmitters in satellites or on the ground.

Commercial and customizable ranging-based positioning systems such as Locata use some of the principles of GNSS and can provide high accuracy. However, they require not just user equipment, but also an investment in signal broadcasting infrastructure. Still, they can service an unlimited number of users. Hence, the cost of user equipment — the complexity is similar to GNSS receivers — can be reduced enormously, potentially at a level that is lower than a high-performance INS or quality image-based system.

IGM: Which non-GNSS technologies that are currently or soon to be available provide accuracy comparable to GNSS that would be affordable for consumer markets?

RIZOS: There are two classes of technologies. One is the vision/scanning sensor technology — referred to here as “image-based systems” — that can provide centimeter-level accuracy (under appropriate illumination conditions). The second is ranging-based positioning technologies described earlier.

The former category will rapidly become more affordable as the vision/camera technology is no more expensive than a GNSS chip. With increases in volume sales (primarily to address the intelligent vehicle market), the cost of laser scanning technology will also drop rapidly. (There are already sub-$100 systems on the market.) The latter class of technology cannot be expected to drop in cost as rapidly as the former because no consumer mass-market applications exist for them yet.

IGM: What are the main challenges facing design and manufacturing of ubiquitous positioning products?

RIZOS: All non-GNSS positioning technologies face many more hurdles to acceptance than GNSS. GNSS is such a widely available, high-performance, and comparatively mature technology that it is hard to see it being replaced as the technology of choice to address positioning requirements across a broad range of consumer and professional market sectors.

The challenge for non-GNSS technologies is to be as versatile as GNSS. Frankly, that is an impossible aspiration, and integrated GNSS/non-GNSS systems will involve trade-offs between accuracy, availability, cost, power requirements, form factor, and coverage. As a result there will be considerable fragmentation in positioning system options.

Not only manufacturing (or other technical) challenges must be addressed, but also issues such as scalability, areal coverage, customer expectations, and product offerings. For example, a product optimized for warehouse positioning may be unsuitable for industrial applications, or for personal navigation.

So, ubiquitous positioning has come a long way in the last few years, but it still has further to go to become a practical reality.

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