From Gizmodo:
Military drones rely heavily on GPS for navigation guidance while in the air. But in areas where a signal can't be found, or where someone is using a GPS jammer, a drone will find itself in a troublesome predicament. Military sub-contractor BAE Systems has come up with a solution to that problem: Apositioning system called NAVSOP that uses any wireless signal to find its location.
The genius of NAVSOP (Navigation via Signals of Opportunity) is that it really doesn't matter what the signal is. It can be a TV signal, radio signal, wi-fi signal, or even a GPS jamming signal. And the part that excites BAE is that the infrastructure is already in place. They don't have to build out a network of transmitters. What excites us is that it works indoors, meaning if this was integrated into all navigation products—and not just military tools—we could have powerful location assistance services indoors and in dense cities. The BBC says that the NAVSOP box requires GPS at first to learn about its surroundings. But over time as it amasses a database of location information, it will become less and less reliant on GPS.
The system is currently a prototype box that can be linked up to whatever is in need of navigation assistance, but BAE believes it can be shrunk down into a dongle-sized package.It's like the navigation equivalent of the tech Bruce Wayne used in Batman Begins to see through walls using people's cellphone signals. [BAE via BBC via Engadget]
Comments
Like Skyhook, this could augment, replace or support GPS. Is the hard part in integrating the hardware that is able to pick up all kinds of usable RF? A very wideband antenna setup and the dedicated hardware to crunch the numbers to make sense of it all, and referencing it with its database, sure makes for an interesting system.
So BAE's system can use pretty much any frequency, to me they just built a SDR that does GPS (i.e. time syncing). It's been done before. And considering the "big box", sounds about right. But I hope they solved the reflection issues that are more prevailing in terrestrial-based com systems to get clock accuracy close to what GPS provides.
Good show Gary! There are astro nav plugins as well.......
I think switching to a vision based is much more feasible than simply swapping one frequency for navigation from another Gary..
Don't forget vision based systems are out there as well.
I can't believe it's that more difficult to jam huge swathes of frequency. Hell, a spark generator will do that. All the main useable frequencies are quite predictable, the only feasible solution seems to be inertial navigation.
This sounds like what an iPhone does to get a location fix while it is waiting to get a GPS lock...triangulating off of cell towers and known wifi base stations. The difference is that Apple has a database of all of these signal sources that was expensive to build and now must be maintained. This approach sounds like it builds the database locally, onboard, as the vehicle moves around. I'm kind of surprised we haven't seen a university or open source effort along these lines, since all the radios are getting so cheap and small...maybe it's out there and I just haven't noticed?
Electronic warfare has been around since Vietnam and there are weapons capable of taking out any Jamming or " control signal If the military felt threatened they would alter or shut GPS off .In this post they are Talking about the old radio direction finder here they were becoming automatic and were getting computing skills worked best up to 150 miles when Loran came along and put you within 16 ft 1,000 miles away Have a good day!
3D sonar was working really well when I gave up on it & no-one has made any traction with it, since then.