Earlier this week DARPA and Boeing issued press releases announcing a joint venture to produce navigation systems that do not rely solely on GPS satellites for determining position. The system will use everything from cellular to television, grabbing on to whatever it can find and then (presumably) searching its coordinate database to see if it can recognize the signals it receives, then work out a position based on what it finds.

 

Press release:

http://www.boeing.com/news/releases/2007/q2/070418c_nr.html

 

News Story:

http://www.gizmag.com/go/7140/

 

Gotta love the initials. Kinda thwarts anyone asking when it will be ready.

isn't this just an extention of the existing radio beacon network they used pre-GPS and still use?

As I understand it, RDF systems like VOR and LORAN operate on a time-based principle rather than a triangulation approach. So my guess is that this system would grab those sources as fixed points for legs in a triangulation, but ignore their time-based pulse signals. Makes sense -- those stations are emitting known radio signals from fixed locations. Might as well use 'em.

 

The beauty of this system, though, is that it (potentially) uses every known EM signal from any fixed (and documented) location that's available to the receiver at a given moment. One of the great things about this idea is that if you're in a source-rich area you don't need to limit yourself to three or four sources for triangulation. You can assume that some of them are incorrectly documented and grab, say, a dozen sources. Why not? It's free data. Grab away. Maybe that'll make your position more accurate by averaging out sources whose positions are less accurately determined than others.

 

I think it's a fascinating example of the advantages of data proliferation in the information age.

don't get me wrong i think its a great idea. it just seemed at first to be a slight tweak. i didn't know the VOR system worked on a time principle, i though it was a position based system.