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A team of Spanish researchers has developed a way to vastly improve in-car GPS navigation — and all it requires is some cheap, extra sensors.
It’s one of those why-didn’t-they-think-of-that-earlier moments. By adding accelerometers and gyroscopes to a car’s navigation system, the researchers from Spain claim that they can pinpoint a car’s location to within 2 metres. That’s far better than the current commercial GPS used in cars, which manages about 15 metres at best, or up to 50 metres in heavily built-up cities.
The best bit, as the BBC reports, is that such a system could be retrofitted to any car, and it wouldn’t be particularly expensive. The newly added sensors simply provide accurate speed and direction information, which combined with the GPS data provide more accurate results. The team is even planning to try and integrate the technology into a smartphone:
“We are now starting to work on the integration of this data fusion system into a mobile telephone. It can integrate all of the measurements that come from its sensors in order to obtain the same result that we have now, but at an even much lower cost, since it is something that almost everyone can carry around in their pocket.”
And that sounds like a direction we’d all like to go in. [BBC]
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Surely navigation apps on smartphones could be easily updated to take advantage of this?
Yep, plus they can be downloaded to work offline as well.
The idea itself has been around a while, Inertial Navigation is used in aircraft but it’s more about getting the tiny gyros which are now available.
“and all it requires is some cheap, extra sensors.”
Which TomTom and co will charge extortionate amounts for the “most accurate gps blah blah blah ever!”
Does Android not already do this with the “Use sensors to improve position” option?
It does it when you’re walking I think.
Don’t cars with ESP already have a gyroscope and accelerometer?..
I thought the TomTom app on my iPhone already did this? If I am in a long tunnel and go around a bend, it appears to re-calibrate where it thinks I am. I assumed (possibly incorrectly) that it was using the accelerometer to do this?
If you maintain speed and direction of travel, the acceleration would read zero lateral acceleration. Possibly it then would display you continuing at your previous rate and then if you speed up, go faster and vice versa. More likely it just takes a note of the speed you enter the tunnel and then projects your position along the route of the road. It will continue accordingly until it re-establishes GPS signal.
I have a TomTom Via Live and it does this too. It does have an acceleration in it but I think it is just for screen rotation, I could be totally wrong though.