Japan’s Plan for Centimeter-Resolution GPS
April 26th, 2014Via: IEEE:
A stranger to Tokyo could easily get lost in its urban canyons. And GPS navigation, stymied by low resolution and a blocked view of the sky, might not be much help. But that won’t be the case after 2018. Engineers at Tokyo-based Mitsubishi Electric Corp. report that they’re on track to start up the first commercial, nationwide, centimeter-scale satellite positioning technology. As well as spot-on navigation, the technology will also usher in a variety of innovative new applications, its proponents say.
Named Quazi-Zenith Satellite System (QZSS), it is designed to augment Japan’s use of the U.S.-operated Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite service. By precisely correcting GPS signal errors, QZSS can provide more accurate and reliable positioning, navigation, and timing services.
Today’s GPS receivers track the distance to four or more GPS satellites to calculate the receiver’s position. But because of the various errors inherent in the GPS system, location can be off by several meters. In using the data from QZSS to correct the measured distance from each satellite, the accuracy of the calculated position is narrowed down to the centimeter scale.
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This centimeter-scale precision promises to usher in a number of creative, or at least greatly improved, applications beyond car and personal navigation. Besides pointing out obvious uses like mapping and land surveying, Sam Pullen, a senior research engineer in the department of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford, says precision farming and autonomous tractor operations will be big applications. “Unmanned aerial vehicles and autonomous vehicles in general,” he adds, “will also find centimeter-level positioning valuable in maintaining and assuring separation from other vehicles and fixed obstacles.”
