Blog post: swansont: Let's Get Small

Pardon the absence; I've spent some time at a DARPA meeting reviewing progress on work being done under the umbrella of DARPA's efforts to shrink the hardware for devices related to position, navigation and time, known as MicroPNT. I can't write about any of the details, which is unfortunate because some of the science and engineering is amazing, but you can get an overview of the program and learns some of the particulars:

Microtechnology Comes of Age

Expert Advice: The Chip-Scale Combinatorial Atomic Navigator

Basically DARPA has identified that portable navigation devices that aren't tied to GPS are important, and are pushing smart people to think about the problem. The program goals are aggressive and each stage progressively so, and they expect the failure rate to be high. But the people involved are scientists, so they understand that research doesn't always pan out. Such programs allow scientists to try risky things to see if they pan out, and even in failure things are learned.

Listening to all of these talks and visiting the posters has been quite draining.

Monday's post now seems quite timely, as that seems to be a European effort along these same lines.
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