u‑blox has announced the NEO-M8T and LEA-M8T precision timing modules, which are able to generate a precise reference clock with <20 ns accuracy. The receivers offer high sensitivity (-157 dBm signal acquisition with assisted GNSS) that allows quick start-up inside structures with limited sky view. The precise reference clock is derived from multi-GNSS including GPS, GLONASS, and BeiDou.
The LEA-M8T module is footprint compatible with existing LEA-5T/6T designs, facilitating easy upgrade. The NEO-M8T is optimized for timing applications requiring low power consumption and long battery life such as geophones used for seismic field measurements. Both compact, surface-mount modules meet stringent requirements for reliability, accuracy and low power consumption.
“These new modules are the industry’s highest performance GNSS timing modules in terms of accuracy, reliability and power consumption,” said Thomas Nigg, Vice President of Product Marketing at u-blox, “The new modules are perfect solutions for mission-critical infrastructure systems including mobile communication networks, power generation and distribution systems and seismic measurements.”
The NEO and LEA-M8T modules are multi-GNSS, pin-compatible successors to u-blox’ existing PPS timing modules and complements the previously announced GNSS disciplined frequency reference module, LEA‑M8F.
Measuring 12.2 x 16.0 mm (NEO-M8T) and 17.0 x 22.4 mm (LEA-M8T), the modules deliver high integrity and reliability with RAIM (Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring) and alarms, which are crucial features for extremely reliable operation. Two time-pulse outputs are available, configurable from once per minute up to 10 MHz. The modules also output multi-GNSS RAW data including carrier phase, code phase and pseudo-ranges.
The modules can deliver time according to any international standard including calibration of inter-constellation offsets. Survey-in and single satellite timing features increase timing accuracy and timing availability with as few as one single satellite in view. Support for low duty cycle operation reduces power consumption for battery-powered applications which results in cost savings as smaller batteries can be used.
The M8T timing modules are delivered in u-blox’ established LEA and NEO form-factors with standardized pin-out, allowing ready migration from previous product generations. u-blox timing products can make optional use of u-blox AssistNow or industry standard aiding data. This reduces the time to first fix and delivers exceptional acquisition sensitivity, even on first installation before precise location or time is known.
Ultra-Low-Power, High-Accuracy Location for Wearable GNSS Devices: From Host-Based to On-Chip
Photo: Steve Malkos, Manuel del Castillo, and Steve Mole, Broadcom Inc., GNSS Business Unit
As location penetrates smaller and smaller devices that lack memory and computation power, GNSS chips must reacquire the standalone capability that they shed when first going to small form factors such as phones. A new chip with a new architecture demonstrates navigation and tracking and avoids burdening its main processor with heavy software.
By Steve Malkos, Manuel del Castillo, and Steve Mole, Broadcom Inc., GNSS Business Unit
End users first experienced the amazing capabilities of GPS 12 years ago with early mass-market GPS devices. The focus was on navigation applications with specific tracking devices like personal navigation devices and personal digital assistants (PNDs, PDAs). With the advent of smartphones, GPS became a must-have feature. Other constellations were added to improve performance: GLONASS, QZSS, SBAS, and very recently, BeiDou. In the current phase, the focus is shifting to fitness applications and background location. This is not an insignificant change.
Always-on connected applications, high-resolution displays, and other such features do not improve battery life. This article describes new ultra-low-power, high-accuracy location solutions for wearables’ power consumption.
Impact of Always-On Connected Applications
New applications require frequent GNSS updates with regard to user position. Sometimes the application will be open and other times it will not. The chips need to keep working in the background, buffering information and taking predefined actions. The GNSS chips need to be able to cope with these new requirements in a smart way, so that battery life is not impacted. Saving power is now the name of the game.
Furthermore, GNSS is penetrating small devices: the Internet of Things (IoT) and wearables. They do not have the luxury of large resources (memory, computation power) as smartphones do. GNSS chips cannot leverage the resources in those devices; they need to be as standalone as possible. In summary, the new scenario demands chips that:
do not load device’s main processor with heavy software;
use less power while maintaining accuracy;
can be flexibly configured for non-navigation applications.
New GNSS Chip Architectures
The industry is designing chips to meet these requirements by including the following features:
measurement engine (ME) and positioning engine (PE) hosted on the chip;
accelerometer and other sensors directly managed by the chip;
new flexible configurations, duty cycling intervals, GNSS measurement intervals, batching, and so on.
These features require hardware and software architectural changes. The new chips need more RAM than that required for smartphones, as they must now host the ME and PE. Wearables and IoT devices are small, cheap, and power-efficient. They do not have large processors and spare memory to run large software drivers for the GNSS chip. In many cases, the device’s microcontroller unit (MCU) is designed to go into sleep mode if not required, that is, during background applications. Therefore, new GNSS chips with more RAM are much better adapted to this new scenario.
New chips must tightly integrate with sensors. The accelerometer provides extremely valuable information for the position update. It can detect motion, steps, motion patterns, gestures, and more. However, as a general rule, the MCU’s involvement in positioning should be minimized to reduce power consumption. For power efficiency, the new GNSS chips must interface directly with the sensors and host the sensor drivers and the sensor software.
Finally, new chips must adapt to different human activities as they are integrated into wearable devices. This is the opposite approach from past developments where GNSS development was focused on one use case: car navigation. Now they must adapt to walking, running, cycling, trekking, swimming, and so on. All these activities have their particularities that can determine different modes in which new GNSS chips can work. Electronics must now conform to humans instead of the other way around. New wearable-chip GNSS tracking strategies include dynamic duty cycling and buffering, which contribute to the goal of reducing power consumption without compromising accuracy.
Satellite positioning embedded in devices over the last few years first saw on-chip positioning before the era of smartphones, where you had dedicated SoCs that supported the silicon used to compute the GNSS fix. These expensive chips had lots of processing power and lots of memory. Once GNSS started to be integrated into cellphones, these expensive chips did not make sense. GNSS processing could be offloaded from the expensive SoCs, and part of the GNSS processing was moved onto the smartphone application processor directly.
Since navigation is a foreground type of application, the host-based model was, and is still, a very good fit. But with advances in wearable devices, on-chip positioning will become the new architecture. This is because the host processor is small with very limited resources on wearables; and because energy must be minimized in wearables, reducing the processor involvement when computing GNSS fixes is critical.
Some vendors are taking old stand-alone chips designed for PNDs and repurposing them for wearable devices. This approach is not efficient, as these chips are large, expensive, and use a lot of power.
GNSS Accuracy
While the new fitness and background applications in wearables have forced changes in GNSS chips’ hardware and software architectures, GNSS accuracy cannot be compromised. Customers are used to the accuracy of GNSS; there’s no going backwards in performance in exchange for lower power consumption.
Figure 1. Software architecture for wearables.
A series of tests shown here demonstrate how a new wearable, ultra-low-power GNSS chip produces a comparable GNSS track to existing devices using repurposed full-power sportwatch chips, while using only a fraction of the power.
Speed Accuracy. Not only does the ultra-low-power solution produce a comparable GNSS track, it actually outperforms existing solutions when it comes to speed and distance, thanks to close integration with sensors and dynamic power saving features (Figures 2 and 3).
Figure 2. Ultra-low-power versus full power.Figure 3. Full-power sportwatch, left, and ultra-low power chip, right, in more accuracy testing.
GNSS Reacquisition. GNSS-only wearable devices face a design challenge: to provide complete coverage and to avoid outliers. This is seen most clearly when the user runs or walks under an overpass (Figure 4). Familiar to urban joggers everywhere, the underpass allows the user to cross a busy road without needing to check for traffic, but requires the GNSS to reacquire the signals on the tunnel exit. See the GNSS track in Figure 5: when the device reacquires the signals, the position and speed accuracy suffers.
Figure 4. Position accuracy on reacquisition, emerging from overpass.Figure 5. GNSS speed accuracy on reacquisition.
Using the filtered GNSS and sensors, however (Figure 6), enables smooth tracking of speed and distance through the disturbance.
Figure 6. Sensors provide smooth speed estimate.
Urban Multipath. The pace analysis in Figure 7 shows a user instructed to run at a constant 8-minute/mile pace, stopping to cross the street where necessary. The red line on each plot shows the true pace profile. The commercial GNSS-only sportwatch on top shows frequent multipath artifacts, missing some of the stops and, worse for a runner, incorrectly showing erroneously high pace. The ultra-low-power chip captures all the stops and shows a constant running pace when not stopped.
Figure 7. Urban multipath tests.
It is well known in the community that regular sportwatches give unreliable speed and distance estimates in urban environments — where most organized running races are held! There’s nothing worse, as a runner, than to hear the distance beep from your watch going off earlier than expected: how demoralizing! The major benefit of this solution is that the speed estimate is much more reliable in the presence of multipath. At the same time, battery life can be extended because the GNSS is configured to use significantly less power.
fSpeed in existing solutions is computed in two different ways: indirectly from two consecutive, time-stamped GNSS position estimates, each derived from range measurements to the satellites, and directly from the Doppler frequency offset measurements to the satellites. Both range and frequency measurements are subject to significant error when the direct path to the satellite is blocked and a reflection is acquired.
The effects of multipath mean that the range error may in typical urban environments be hundreds of meters. The frequency error is also a function of the local geometry and is typically constrained by the magnitude of the user’s horizontal speed.
In either case, the GNSS device alone, in the presence of signal multipath, generates a velocity vector that fluctuates significantly, especially when there is a change in the satellites used or signal propagation path between the two consecutive positions. A variety of real-life cases generate this sudden fluctuation in velocity vector:
Running along a street in an urban canyon and turning a 90-degree corner.
Running along a pedestrian lane and taking a short road underpass.
Running under tree cover and suddenly arriving at an open area.
Running under an elevated highway and turning 90 degrees to a wide-open area.
In each case, the chips are using a certain set of satellites, and suddenly other, higher signal-strength satellites become available. A typical situation is for the position to be lagging the true position (while under tree cover, going through an underpass) and needing to catch up with the true position when arriving to the wide-open area. A jump in position is inevitable in that situation. This is not too bad for the GNSS track, but it will mean a noticeable peak in the speed values that is not accurate. Fitness applications save all of the computed speed values and generate a report for each workout. These reports are not accurate, especially the maximum speed values, for the reasons explained above.
Figure 8 describes a typical situation where the actual speed of the runner is approximately constant. GNSS fixes are computed regularly; however, the speed computed from subsequent GNSS fixes have sudden peaks that spoil the workout speed reports.
Figure 8. Sudden peaks spoil workout speed reports.
The new ultra-low-power solutions for wearables solve this problem by deriving speed and accumulated distance from the sensors running in the device. This avoids incorrect speed peaks, while still being responsive to true pace changes by the runner.
In running biomechanics, runners increase pace by increasing step cadence and/or increasing step length. Both methods depend on the runner’s training condition, technique, biomechanics, and so on. As a general rule, both step cadence and step length increase as the running speed increases from a jogging speed to a 1,500-meter race speed.
A runner may use one mechanism more than the other, depending on the moment or on the slope (uphill or downhill). In the case of male runners, the ratio of step length to height at a jogging speed is ~60 percent.The ratio of step length to height in a 1,500 meter race speed is ~100 percent. For female runners, the respective ratios are ~55 percent and ~90 percent.
The ultra-low-power chips take into account both mechanisms to derive the speed values. The sensor algorithms count the number of steps every time interval and translates the number of steps into distance multiplying by the step length. The reaction time of the GNSS chip to speed changes based on a higher cadence is immediate.
Speed changes due to longer steps are also measured by the ultra-low-power chips. The step length is constantly calibrated by the GNSS fixes when the estimated GNSS position error is low. The reaction time of the GNSS chip to speed changes based on longer steps has some delay, as it depends on the estimated error of the GNSS fixes.
Manufacturer
The ultra-low-power, high-accuracy, 40-nanometer single-die BCM4771 chip was designed by Broadcom Corporation. It is now being manufactured in production volumes and is focused on the wearables and IoT markets.It consumes five times less power than conventional GNSS chips (~10 mW) and needs 30 KBytes of memory in the MCU for the software driver. It features tight integration with the accelerometer and innovative GNSS tracking techniques for extremely accurate speed, accumulated distance, and GNSS tracking data.
Steve Malkos is an associate director of program management in the GPS Business Unit at Broadcom, responsible for defining GPS sensor hub and indoor positioning features. He has a B.S. in computer science from Purdue University, and currently holds eight patents,10 more pending, in location.
Manuel del Castillo is an associate director of marketing for Broadcom in the GNSS group. He has an MS in electronic engineering from the Polytechnic Universityand an MBA from the Instituto de Empresa, both in Madrid, Spain. He holds three patents in location with five more pending.
Steve Mole is a manager of software engineering for Broadcom in the GNSS group. He received his bachelor’s degree in physics and astrophysics from the University of Manchester.
CSR has added significant upgrades to its SiRFDRive software dead-reckoning algorithms, improving automotive positioning performance and meeting the requirements of leading OEMs across the globe. This video demonstrates how these latest algorithms improves the overall performance in Chicago, once of the most challenging environments to obtain accurate vehicle positioning results.
A new Placecast poll indicates that nearly 118 million smartphone owners will be relying on their phones for holiday shopping this year. For smartphone owners who plan to do holiday shopping, three out of four will use their phones to find sales, comparison shop, take pictures of possible gifts, and make purchases.
The survey also showed that American shoppers are very aware of in-store beacons, despite the fact that it is a relatively new technology; more than half (52 percent) of the cell phone/smartphone owners surveyed said they have heard of in-store beacons, and 15 percent have engaged with them.
“Brands that embrace beacons are highly likely to see a spike in their sales in the coming shopping season and in general,” said Placecast CEO Alistair Goodman.
Beacon technology is only one indoor location technology being pursued by retailers. Kevin Dennehy’s Wireless LBS Insider column from August, Indoor Location Has Major Growing Pains, but Big Upside, provides an overview.
Conducted in October among more than 2,000 U.S. adults, this was the fifth survey in Placecast’s Alert Shopper series, one of the longest running research series around how consumers interact with various marketing and purchasing mechanisms. This year’s poll reveals the latest trends in mobile shopping and provides key insights for brands and technology providers on how to connect with the highly connected consumer this holiday season, when stakes are high. The poll was conducted online within the U.S. for Placecast by Harris Poll.
According to the National Retail Federation (NRF), holiday spending will be up nearly 5 percent this year compared to last year, with the average person expected to spend about $800. The NRF reports that gift givers “plan to splurge” for holidays like Christmas, Kwanzaa, and Hanukah: “Consumers are spending more across the board on family, friends, co-workers, pets and even babysitters…Sales and discounts were listed as the most important factor.”
“It’s not surprising that consumers are most influenced by sales and discounts; the question is, what is the best way to get these offers to them? Our survey looked at various ways brand can reach customers, and we found that reaching users on mobile while they are near stores, and using in-store technology — like beacons — are some of the best ways of reaching consumers who are looking for offers, or for more information to make a purchase,” said Goodman.
Beacons are a small, low-cost piece of hardware installed in stores. They emit a signal (called Bluetooth low energy, or BLE) that can be targeted directly to phones. Beacons can bring the analytics and targeting capabilities of the online experience to physical stores — for example, sending a discount for perfume to a 40-year-old woman who has recently done an online search for scents.
Because beacon technology is relatively new, the high awareness level discovered in this wave of the Alert Shopper series may seem surprising to the industry; the research team involved in data analysis for the Harris Nielsen poll explains the possible cause: “Consumers are clearly voting in favor of beacons due to stores promoting them and the value they deliver in couponing. While awareness seems high at 52 percent, this may be due to people wanting to identify with the coolness of new technologies, and certainly indicates huge promise for it. Minority Report is looking more and more like a reality than a movie,” said Kathryn Koegel, chief of Insights and Communications Steampunkt Collaborative.
Goodman seconds this “halo effect” of new tech: “There could very well be a huge halo effect here, but nonetheless, one fact remains: we are all now assuming that there is technology in stores that can connect with our phones — whether it’s opening an app or getting a push notification. But the real art lies in delivering timely and useful ads and offers, not overwhelming the consumer, and making sure the promotions are targeted accurately.”
The Alert Shopper V survey revealed that 15 percent of cell phone/smartphone owners had interacted with beacons. “Though this number is likely higher than the actual number of people who have interacted with in-store beacons, the fact that people are highly aware of them and think they interact with them bodes well for the technology,” said Koegel.
The importance of in-store marketing was underscored by another data point from the Placecast survey; the top activity for Mobile Millennial females (women 18-34 who own a smartphone and plan on doing any holiday shopping this year) — when asked what they plan to use their smartphone for while holiday shopping this season — is searching for a coupon for a store they are already in, with over half (52 percent) looking to save money by checking their phones. The same percentage said they would use their smartphone to take a picture of a potential gift to text a friend or family member for their opinion (52 percent).
The Alert Shopper Survey #5 revealed these key takeaways for brands and marketers this holiday season:
Phones are an integral part of the shopping process: among those who plan on doing any holiday shopping, 3 out of 4 smartphone owners plan to use their phones for some part of their gift-finding and buying experience.
Among all smartphone owners, searching for an item in a search engine to find a local retailer topped the list of mobile actions for holiday shopping this season, with 2 out of 5 (39 percent) saying they plan to use their smartphone for this; sending a picture of a potential gift to a friend or family member at a close second (38 percent), followed by searching for a coupon for the store they’re in (33 percent).
Mobile Millennials are the most active mobile shoppers this holiday season: Young men ages 18-34 (91 percent) and women ages 18-34 (85 percent) who own smartphones reported the highest percentages when asked if they plan to use their phones while shopping this holiday season; these Millennials make up about 25 percent of the United States population, outpacing Baby Boomers and Gen X (ages 28-38). Though they have not reached their peak spending potential, Millennials nonetheless control 21 percent of consumer discretionary purchases, which is estimated at over a trillion dollars in direct buying power and a huge influence on purchases by older generations (i.e., parents and grandparents).
Moms and dads with children under 18 in their household will be very active on mobile: 86 percent of dads plan to use their smartphones for holiday shopping this year. When asked what they will use their phones for the most popular answer among dads was “use my phone to look for an item in a search engine to find a local retailer.” Over half (54 percent) gave this answer. Three out of four (75 percent) mothers plan on using their smartphones for holiday shopping this year. While men are searching for retail locations, mobile moms selected “take pictures of potential gifts to text and get opinions from friends/family” as the top mobile activity, with nearly half (48 percent) saying they will do this.
Nearly 5 million smart and basic wearable bands shipped in Q3 2014, with total unit shipments increasing 37% quarter on quarter as Android Wear made its mark for the first time, according to a report by independent analyst company Canalys.
Motorola Mobility’s Moto 360 was by far the most successful of the initial Android Wear devices, accounting for more than 15% of the smart band market according to Canalys estimates. Despite being supply-constrained, its appealing design helped it to easily out-ship other Android Wear products.
LG has responded to early interest in the Moto 360 by quickly adopting a circular display with the G Watch R.
Meanwhile, Samsung remained the overall smart band market leader, and the company has already begun to experiment with larger display sizes and cellular connectivity with the Gear S, its sixth smart band.
Though the platform is still young, Android Wear will be fundamental to the development of the market, as it is poised to be one of the two dominant wearable operating systems outside of China, alongside Apple’s Watch OS. But Google will need to redesign the Android Wear user interface before the platform can achieve its true potential.
‘The announcement of the Apple Watch late in the quarter has likely had an effect on sales of existing devices, as some consumers will choose to wait for Apple’s wearable,’ said Canalys Analyst Daniel Matte. ‘The smart band market was flat between Q2 and Q3, but with an installed base of over 1.8 billion Android smart phones, there is a huge potential market of Android users not considering an Apple Watch.”
Fitbit and Jawbone held onto their first and second place positions, respectively, in the basic band market for the quarter, and both have just announced new products. Garmin passed Nike to take third place in shipments, while Xiaomi and Huawei also overtook the one-time market leader and rounded out the top five. “Low-end basic bands providing simple activity tracking functionality are becoming increasingly commoditized, and will flood the market heading into the holidays, especially in China,” said Canalys Analyst Jingwen Wang. ‘To combat this, Fitbit, Jawbone and others have attempted to make basic bands smarter, adding various smart watch features and increasing the sophistication and integration of sensors.’
Google Fit, Microsoft Health and the Samsung Digital Health Platform have all recently been announced in response to Apple’s HealthKit. While the new Microsoft Band does not have strong hardware appeal, Microsoft’s cross-platform cloud services approach is a wise strategy, and the company is importantly staking its relevance early in a new market. There is tremendous opportunity for brand new services on wearable platforms, and not just in the area of health and fitness. Expect developers to eagerly embrace Apple’s WatchKit SDK, expected to be released in early 2015.
Wearable band shipment data is taken from Canalys’ Wearable Technology Analysis service, which provides quarterly market tracking, including country-level estimates. Canalys defines basic wearable bands as devices serving a specific set of purposes that act as accessories to smart devices, are designed to be worn on the body and not carried, and that cannot run third-party computing applications. Smart wearable bands are multi-purpose devices that serve as accessories to smart devices, are designed to be worn on the body and not carried, and are capable of running third-party computing applications. Bands are wearables designed to be wrapped around the body and do not include activity trackers in the form of clips.
Hacking, Privacy, and Consumer Acceptance Top the List
Vehicle styling, speed and looks took the back seat while capabilities driven by GPS, sensors and data were up front at this week’s Los Angeles Auto Show’s Connected Car Expo. Privacy and security, distractibility and safety, and human interfaces were all hot issues. The terms connected car and autonomous cars were being used interchangeably, as a continuum of an evolving set of capabilities. The least-asked question: If we build an autonomous vehicle, will it sell or become an expensive niche product? And how will the market respond to mechanical failures or accidents, even if the vehicles are proved to be overall safer and more reliable?
Not Happy with Navigation. With little to individually distinguish car models, auto makers are looking to infotainment to uniquely brand their vehicles. Yet drivers identify navigation and multimedia among the “lower quality” features of their vehicles. While consumers report that the quality of almost all other features of their vehicles are improving, they indicate that the quality of their navigation and multimedia are declining. “The problem is overly complex systems,” reports Renne Stephens of J.D. Power. “Usability is now considered by consumers as a factor of quality.”
Car makers are under enormous pressure to add functionality demanded by consumers, and make the whole experience simpler. Many of the features embraced by automakers have not attracted the interest of drivers. Stephens reports that valued features include surround view camera with rear vision, wireless charging station, near field communication and smartphone field integration. What they don’t value are eye tracking, tactile touch screens, hand gesture control and laser headlights.
Hacking. Discussions on security were enlivened with the inclusion of hacker Chris Valasek. You may remember that last year Valasek and his partner, Charlie Miller, hacked into the steering and brakes of a Prius and Ford Escape, solely by attaching a laptop to the vehicles. Members of an Israeli intelligence unit reported that they had remotely hacked into a vehicle wirelessly via an aftermarket insurance dongle (in this case, Zubie) that was plugged into the vehicle’s OBDII port. Dongles might make people safer drivers, but could they lead to an unwanted adventure?
Valasek and Miller created a list of the most hackable vehicles with the Jeep Cherokee, Cadillac Escalade and Toyota Prius as the most vulnerable. The Dodge Viper, Audi A8 and Honda Accord top the most secure list. Malicious attacks could range from enabling a microphone to eavesdrop to the catastrophic, such as controlling steering or brakes.
Valasek assured conference goers that hacking vehicles isn’t easy. No matter how many layers of protection are created, no vehicle that communicates with the outside world will be hack-proof. Last month, automakers announced that they are forming a consortium that will be dedicated to deterring “black hat hackers” and will create a venue for the auto industry to share information about hacking attempts.
Dreams and Nightmares. The best-case scenario for the automotive OEMs is a connected vehicle industry in which they control the ecosystem and derive high revenues, as well as driverless cars starting to become common around 2024. In reality, the OEMS may encounter lagging consumer acceptance, perhaps shattered by catastrophic accidents, reliability issues or privacy troubles. Regulation might cause insurmountable constraints. The driverless car could become a niche product and a costly failure.
In another possible scenario, the connected autonomous vehicle becomes a success, but the tech and digital companies win the market with parallels similar to how the PCs took the industry from IBM. The OEMs become a pipeline with little value and the tech companies take home the bacon. If the market fails, the VCs will stop investing and some of these tech companies may fold. The Tesla offers an example of how this scenario might unfold.
Privacy. Automakers are making a commitment to privacy in the vehicle far beyond that made by companies like Apple or Google, which are vying for a piece of connected vehicles. Nineteen automakers just signed a set of principles delivered to the Federal Trade Commission. “Google may want to become an automaker, but we don’t want to become Google,” said Mitch Bainwol of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers. The OEMs provide assurance that they will not share information from vehicles that is streamed back to automakers or that is downloaded from the vehicle’s computers. They pledge information won’t be handed over to authorities without a court order, sold to insurance or other companies or used to bombard them with ads for Starbucks, gas stations or other businesses they drive past, without their permission.
“You just don’t want your car spying on you,” said Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “That’s the practical consequence of a lot of the new technologies that are being built into cars.” The automakers signing on to the principles are: Aston Martin, BMW, Chrysler, Ferrari, Ford, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Maserati, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Porsche, Subaru, Toyota, Volkswagen and Volvo.
Uptake. About half of us like to drive and the other half just want to get there, reports futurist Peter Schwartz. Younger populations are increasingly in the transport camp, as illustrated by the popularity of Uber, Lyft and Zip Cars. How to win the whole market is to “automate the boring parts of driving,” says Håkan Samuelsson of Volvo.”
J.D. Powers reports that consumers perceive the autonomous vehicle as a driver completely detached from the driving experience. This isn’t too close to the reality that is within reach; the driver will need to be engaged and ready to assume control when called upon. But the dream of catching a few winks on the way to work is a good one. Will this vision be led by Detroit or Silicon Valley? We should find out soon.
Buddy Platform, Inc., has launched its new platform that hosts and manages data generated by any connected device, enabling measurement of a device from the moment it’s turned on throughout its entire lifecycle. This data, often referred to as “telemetry data,” conveys information about the performance and usage of the device, and is now accessible from any common BI tool.
Buddy helps answer the question, “How is this device being used?” and “Is it performing like we designed it to?”. Buddy is live with customers in industries such as aviation, automotive (connected cars), retail, connected home, consumer electronics and embedded silicon.
While most connected or “Internet of Things” devices have functionality to enable control or monitoring (such as from a mobile app), relatively few are making performance and usage data accessible for analysis. By giving product management, engineering and support teams access to this data, and the insights that are derived from it, organizations can dramatically increase their ability to build better products and support the customers of these products in-market.
“Now that devices as varied as door locks, light bulbs, kiosks and cars are all becoming connected, there’s a huge amount of data that can give manufacturers exactly the information they need to support and improve their products,” said David McLauchlan, CEO of Buddy Platform. “Device manufacturers are not cloud infrastructure companies. They’ve built technology into their products to control the device, but haven’t built the infrastructure to access and use the device’s telemetry data to improve the product and delight customers. Buddy makes it fast and easy to access those insights and immediately understand more deeply how customers are using these kinds of IoT devices.”
Adding to the challenge is that the regulatory environment for data storage is becoming more complex. Various countries are enacting legislation that specifies how and where personal data may be stored.
Buddy works by hosting a series of regionally sandboxed, global BuddyAPI endpoints to which devices can send their raw telemetry data. This data is pushed into a secure storage infrastructure called BuddyVault, whereupon it is then managed, queried and exposed back to the customer in any form they wish with BuddyView. This may take the form of integrations into common business intelligence tools, or as raw APIs that can be plugged into any customer or M2M scenario.
With the addition of a few lines of code, the Buddy Platform offers a low overhead solution for extracting telemetry data from a device, and can make an unprecedented amount of device performance data broadly accessible to an organization, including:
How is this device being used? Is it performing like we designed it to, is it working as expected?
What error codes is my device reporting, and how is that affecting the customer experience?
How many of my devices are being used?
Where are they?
When are they used and how often?
Are they on or off?
How are my devices communicating with one another? If not, what’s not working?
How are my devices performing with connected ecosystems like smart homes or industrial infrastructure?
Buddy uses standard technologies including REST service over HTTPS, which means any device with Internet connectivity can use Buddy. There are no agents, no heavy runtime to install, and the platform offers access managed, queried subsets of the data, which are available via completely customized JSON APIs.
CSR plc today announced the launch of its SiRFusion Software Development Kit (SDK) for Android application developers. The solution enables indoor positioning for Android developers looking to create next-generation apps.
Developers can now leverage the SiRFusion library to rapidly integrate new location-based capabilities and services such as indoor location tagging and analytics for social networking applications, indoor navigation, lone worker efficiency and safety capabilities, as well as indoor asset tracking and targeted e-commerce services.
CSR is being acquired by Qualcomm, with the transaction expected to close by the end of the summer of 2015.
Mobile applications with integrated SiRFusion can now deliver the ubiquity of outdoor navigation to indoor environments without costly surveys or infrastructure upgrades. SiRFusion combines real-time Wi-Fi signals, satellite positioning information, pedestrian dead reckoning, and the company’s cloud-based CSR Positioning Center to calculate accurate indoor location. SiRFusion technology provides the accurate indoor position fixes needed to make continuous indoor navigation a part of everyday life. The system automatically crowd-sources a venue’s indoor Wi-Fi signatures as consumers walk through the location, and it has also been architected to accommodate future proximity and location technologies such as Bluetooth Smart beacons, Wi-Fi Round Trip Time (RTT), and Indoor Messaging System (IMES).
“Offering indoor positioning accurate enough to be useful has been a challenge that the industry has been trying to solve for many years,” said Anthony Murray, Senior Vice President, Business Group at CSR. “But with consumers coming to expect anytime-anywhere positioning wherever they are, our customers have continued to express a growing interest for accurate indoor positioning without the need for additional infrastructure. With our SiRFusion Software Development Kit, we have, for the first time, made indoor location a reality for developers who want to deliver innovative location-based products and services without proprietary infrastructure.”
SiRFusion for Android can be integrated into any app running on Android version 4.4 or later. The SDK will be available for download from www.csr.com in Q1 2015, and will include the SiRFusion library, API descriptions, and a Developer’s Guide. CSR will demonstrate SiRFusion for Android at the Location and Context World conference December 2-3, held at the JW Marriott in San Francisco, and at Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas January 6-9, 2015. To schedule a private briefing and demo at either event, contact [email protected]
Since the AT&T Drive Studio opened in January 2014, twelve companies have joined AT&T there in an effort to collaborate and develop new services for the connected car of the future. The latest company to join is LG Electronics, which signed on November 18.
AT&T Drive Studio is a connected car center for innovation and research. Its sponsorship agreement with LG allows the companies to collaborate on the AT&T Drive platform to support services on automotive-grade hardware and equipment for tomorrow’s connected vehicles.
Located in Atlanta, the more than 5,000-square foot AT&T Drive Studio features working garage bays, a speech lab, a full showroom to exhibit the latest innovations, conference facilities, and much more. Drive Studio integrates AT&T solutions across multiple companies and serves as a hub where AT&T can respond to needs of automotive manufacturers and the auto ecosystem at large.
“At the Drive Studio we work with automakers to make the in-car experience better and safer for the driver and passengers,” said Chris Penrose, senior vice president, Internet of Things Solutions, AT&T. “The spirit of the AT&T Drive Studio is to bring together players in the auto industry ecosystem, like LG, to design the road ahead.”
“By analysis of customer insights and Car OEM’s requirements, safety, comfort and convenience are key factors in automotive area,” said Jong Rak Lim, vice president and head of LG’s In-Vehicle Infotainment R&D Lab. “As global telematics supplier, we are very pleased to participate in AT&T Drive Studio as a sponsor and hope to bring better Connected Car solutions into the market together.”
AT&T already provides mobile Internet access in vehicles manufactured by both U.S. and non-U.S. automobile makers. AT&T entered the market with a proprietary, global SIM platform that made it possible for automotive, consumer and M2M equipment makers to work through a single carrier to wirelessly enable and connect products across the globe, and cars are being sold throughout world today with this SIM.
IAV Automotive Engineering test vehicle. Photo: Denso
The autonomous, or driverless, vehicle market seems to be a big side topic at connected car conferences. Location technology will continue to play a role in the development of autonomous vehicle markets. However, many view a fully autonomous vehicle to be more than 10 years away — these are usually folks from the auto industry or academia. Others, those who lurk around Silicon Valley, believe that driverless cars will be on the road in half that time…and once again, if Detroit doesn’t move on it, they will.
Just as GPS was once thought of as science fiction — something that naysayers said would not be fully operational for decades — autonomous vehicles are now thought of as an extension of the connected vehicle market. However, technology and legal issues will make the implementation of an autonomous, or driverless car, a tenuous road in the next few years.
One executive from Verizon Telematics, which is a major player in connected car technology, said it is going to take time, perhaps between the years 2025-2030, to grow the autonomous vehicle market.
“You just can’t flip a switch and have autonomous vehicles [on the road]. You have to take baby steps to develop a network, build an infrastructure and condition the marketplace,” said Kevin Link, Verizon Telematics senior vice president. “The collaboration is going to have to be more than one player, including the government. It was a while before desktop computers evolved into laptops.”
While the technology hurdles will be significant for autonomous vehicles, there are features today that will help shape the market, Link said. “Mercedes cars remind people to steer and turn around corners, when to stop at a safe distance and to change lanes,” he said. “These are not taking you from point A to point B autonomously, but real-time connected car features will feed into the autonomous car.”
The evolution of autonomous vehicles will not be derailed at this point, given the intensive research and investment focus from both the private and public sector, said Tim Johnson, NextEnergy director of transportation initiatives. “However, cars that ‘drive themselves’ will not be in mass production in the next five years. Ten years, maybe. Five, no,” he said. “This is not a technology-limited premise. The technologies are rapidly approaching realistic use in limited applications, but the regulatory, liability and infrastructure aspects are far from being fully implemented in the next five years.”
Technology Hurdles Await Early Autonomous Vehicles — More Regulation than Technology?
Some of the technology hurdles center around the speed, capacity and logic of the vehicle and infrastructure systems to manage the significant amount of information required for self-driving vehicles, Johnson said. “If it was possible to wave a magic wand and have all vehicles made simultaneously capable of these communications and logic decisions, it would be much more viable to create a mass, public environment for self-driving cars,” he said. “In reality, there will be an extensive transition period, possibly 15 to 20 years, where capable vehicles will need to deal with incapable vehicles. Once again, this is not so much a technology issue as it is policy, regulation and liability.”
Autonomous Products Already Out There…
Autonomous vehicles will only continue their current momentum as the technology for assisted driving is already well underway with features like self-parking, lane departure warning, predictive collision warning, back-up collision intervention and blind spot prevention, said Scott Frank, Airbiquity vice president of marketing.
An example is the Infiniti Q50, which uses Airbiquity technology for Infiniti InTouch Apps. “What we’re going to see from here is a shift from driver assistance to zero driver involvement — the ultimate expression of autonomous vehicle — where the car does all the driving and there isn’t even a steering wheel or brake pedal,” Frank said. “We won’t see fully autonomous vehicles becoming commonplace in five years’ time due to the massive amount of technology, infrastructure development and integration that needs to happen to ensure the requisite amount of safety.”
NextEnergy’s Johnson said that cars that drive themselves are already in use in restricted access sites, such as military bases, restricted commercial and university locations, national lab campuses and more. “These are the first real-world applications of both the vehicle and infrastructure technologies to test the practical limits of semi-autonomous driver-still-behind-the-wheel cars,” he said. “Much like the FAA use of limited test sites for the development of regulatory aspects of drone flight, these sites are providing the information and insight to move the potential of cars that drive themselves closer to everyday use.”
A Denso autonomous test vehicle drives the track while a plastic friend looks on. Photo: Denso
Will Public Transit Be the First Proving Ground?
Most companies have different opinions when asked whether the public transit area will be the first major market, and serve as the catalyst, for autonomous vehicle growth. “Although we don’t know for sure, it could be that automated public transit programs, will operate in controlled environments with known routes [meaning low speed operation with pedestrians/bicycles operating on the same thoroughfare, but the automated transit system does not have rails or guide ways — the route planning is easily changeable with no impact to the transportation infrastructure],” said Roger Berg, Denso North American Research and Development office vice president.
Denso believes the autonomous vehicle market will encourage additional functionality within the premium car model lines, but gradually these advanced driver assist systems will become more and more common and eventually spread through even the economy car segment, Berg said. “First systems deploy warnings or simple lateral and longitudinal vehicle control. But then functionality for what most people refer to as ‘driverless cars’ or ‘automated driving’ would only be usable under fairly benign driving and traffic conditions, such as some level of automated highway driving,” he said.
Public transit as an “early adopter” business model is viewed to be less probable in the near term as many of the technical challenges facing autonomous operation require significant research and development and capital investment, said Chris Hennessy, IAV Automotive vice president, engineering. “Most of this capital is centered on markets where the return on the investment can be substantial. At the moment, the most likely scenario for a reasonable ROI is in the premium-brand automotive market, where consumers are willing to pay a premium for new technology,” he said. “This market and the technology growth that will occur from this early-adopter market will provide a foundation for cost-effective proliferation of this technology to other markets, where either the operational boundary conditions are narrower or the available capital is lower, which is typically where public transit would fall. Exceptions to this condition could be analogous to the light-rail market, where the interaction to the general public can be controlled and managed with isolated tracks or lanes of travel, but this would require significant planning and capital investment in infrastructure.”
Airbiquity believes that public transit will not be a first adopter. “No, the first adopters will be private parties in urban areas providing a value proposition to people struggling with congested cities, long commutes, and high parking costs. You’re going to see small and innovative companies offering car services with autonomous vehicles operating on city grids at lower speeds,” Frank said. “They will source the autonomous vehicles from non-traditional automotive makers that move faster than traditional automotive makers. Local government will also be involved, since they own the majority of the infrastructure and need to ensure safety standards are established and met.”
In other location news:
Kore Telematics, fueled by a large investment in it by ABRY Partners, bought RacoWireless in an all-cash deal, according to published reports. The transaction will give the companies a combined 3 million M2M subscribers.
In the time since my first article on indoor location, I’ve learned that there is a whole lot to this indoor location technology and business. A number of companies are taking on the indoor challenge, but few have so far successfully cracked this nut.
Rx Networks in Vancouver, Canada, is one of those few who have not only found solutions that work and work reliably, but it has also found a way to commercialize their solutions and make money.
Its embedded software and services are used daily in more than 1 billion devices — mostly smartphones, some machine-to-machine (M2M) installations, tablets, laptops, and wearables. That is some claim!
Daily transactions are primarily requests for A-GNSS assistance data, but also include requests for location based on Wi-Fi and Cell-IDs. Devices are using various Rx software and/or services, which include any or all data from a four-constellation reference network (GPStream GRN), extended ephemeris (GPStream PGPS), and Wi-Fi/Cell-ID positioning (XYBRID RT).
Founded in 2006, and still privately held, Rx is currently profitable. The head office is in Vancouver, and the company has a remote office in Atlanta, Georgia. Rx Network provides GNSS assistance-data to nearly all North American mobile operators and to several international carriers, helping those customers comply with current E-911 requirements and also offer other location-based services (LBS). In anticipation of a potential FCC “indoor” E-911 mandate, Rx’s offerings have been expanded to provide the location of devices where GNSS is not available. Its patented IP is also licensed through major GNSS semiconductor vendors and, in several cases, directly to the smartphone manufacturers.
Rx’s global reference network (GPStream GRN) is the foundation of many Rx solutions, including real-time assistance data and predictions. The service supports GPS and GLONASS, and will soon incorporate BeiDou and Galileo — the data is used by mobile operators and service providers and as an input to other products like XYBRID Cloud, where assistance data is supplied to a cloud-based positioning engine. And GPStream PGPS supplies data from the reference network to create seed files that generate extended ephemeris on smartphones.
The Rx worldwide network of GNSS reference stations. Photo: Rx Networks
There may be growing concerns about the status of the nascent Galileo constellation, but back in May, there was good signal coverage at times in Vancouver, Naples, and Prague. This enabled Rx to conduct testing on behalf of the European GNSS Agency (GSA) in challenging signal environments. The tests confirmed that Galileo significantly improved the accuracy of location-based services in urban canyons and indoors. Galileo signals were incorporated in the positioning solution with various combinations of GPS and GLONASS.
A new product known as XYBRID Cloud — a “cloud-based software receiver” — is going to trial shortly with a major U.S. carrier interested in using Rx’s indoor GNSS capability to locate small cells, home phone units, and other assets that carriers have to manage. The latest release of Cloud is providing an acquisition sensitivity of –166 dBm, which is claimed to be the best in the industry.
The XYBRID Cloud system. Photo: Rx Networks
XYBRID Cloud captures I & Q data transmitted by satellites and sends it to a cloud-based positioning engine to determine location. This is in contrast to sending it to a receiver engine on a chip within the device. This is automatic, but is not really done for a “user” as much as for an asset such as a Wi-Fi access point, small cell, or other device that someone wants to locate.
Because these devices are often deep indoors, they may only see a few milliseconds of GNSS signals every now and then, so a real-time GNSS chip receiver would never get a fix. However, XYBRID Cloud assembles the captured data over time and is eventually able to record the location of the asset. This may take a few minutes or a few days, but a fix comes together eventually. Given that these assets are normally in fixed locations and seldom if ever move, such delays are not an issue, but knowing their location or if they’ve been moved can be quite valuable.
XYBRID RT/Synchro. Photo: Rx Networks
Another Rx product, XYBRID RT/Synchro,provides Wi-Fi and Cell-ID indoor and outdoor positioning using observed Wi-Fi and -tower signals, both with and without an active network connection. The systems works in real time (RT), and Synchro uses local datasets (regions) for Wi-Fi and other radio beacons that are downloaded into the user device whenever their signal is detected. Each “region” can be tailored to best suit a user’s general location, such as a metro area, city or other venue. The system is capable of a fast GNSS fix with improved sensitivity, or can fall back to basic Cell-ID/Wi-Fi positioning. Location is available indoors with an accuracy of 5-10 meters, depending on the quality of the regional datasets.
Zed provides floor-level detection based on barometric pressure data. Photo: Rx Networks
Zed is able to provide floor-level detection based on barometric pressure data to within a vertical accuracy of 1-3 meters. Zed combines a global pressure reference with crowd-sourced data for fine-grained performance. This improves Wi-Fi location accuracy and supports Wi-Fi crowd sourcing with altitude geo-tagging.
So, Rx indoor solutions can use various combinations of these three products depending on the capabilities of the user devices. XYBRID RT provides location indoors using Cell-IDs, but more often uses Wi-Fi for more accurate positioning. XYBRID Cloud provides location of assets by sending any observed satellite signals to Rx servers for processing. Zed provides a calibration and ground-level reference pressure for a device, typically a smartphone equipped with a barometric sensor. Applications include location determination for smartphones, tablets, and wearables, and XYBRID Cloud finds assets like access points, small cells, Bluetooth beacon gateways, and home phone systems. Three companies are currently using Rx technology in the wearables space — a sports watch, augmented reality glasses, and heads-up display cycling glasses.
Other services supplied by Rx include worldwide Assisted GNSS (A-GNSS):
GPStream GRN – Relies on data collected from the Rx worldwide grid of reference receivers for GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou and Galileo. Data is compatible with all popular positioning servers from leading vendors such as Ericsson, NEC, NSN, Qualcomm, and TCS.
GPStream PGPS – Predicted GPS is an efficient handset-based extended ephemeris A-GNSS solution which supports GPS and GLONASS, for both connected and autonomous operation. Galileo is slated to be demonstrated at the Naviteq conference in December and to be available in 2015 along with BeiDou.Each device equipped with the PGPS client accesses Rx servers at least once every 14 days and downloads a small seed file that is used to create extended ephemeris for each constellation for the following 14 days.
The GPStream PGPS software. Photo: Rx Networks
Rx claims that its A-GNSS services have “carrier-level reliability” — that is to say, 99.999% availability per year.
Rx semi-conductor customers use an IP package that is embedded in processor chips for cell phones. They typically go on to supply Rx software (GPStream PGPS) with their GNSS chips, which is then run on a phone’s host processor — designed in at the factory as part of the phone.
OEM customers buy Rx GPStream PGPS software either directly or from the GNSS chip manufacturer and design it into the smartphone at the factory.
Mobile operators and service providers buy A-GNSS data that is delivered to mobile phones using location-based services for 911 caller location and LBS. Rx also supplies these customers with data containing the locations of Cell-IDs and Wi-Fi access points.
It’s good to hear that someone is already making a living with indoor location. And with so many signals of opportunity, inertial and pressure sensors now being used to “help” or actually completely replace GNSS, the era of indoor testing seems to be giving way to everyday consumer use. The average consumer will likely not realize when they seamlessly transition from outdoors GNSS guidance to “indoor” signals driving their smartphone map inside the mall. Or how really difficult it is for GNSS guidance to work in downtown when they automatically get A-GNSS assistance data that keeps their car map guidance on the correct street. Good for consumers, good for the telecoms guys, and good for the GNSS industry.
Location-based services company Telenav has announced new capabilities and updates to its free Scout mobile application that make the process of connecting and getting together easy and fun. Scout users can now manage the details of creating an event, contacting and inviting friends, choosing a location, communicating with the group and navigating, all within the updated Scout application. Scout is powered by OpenStreetMap.
For iOS devices, the new app experience will offer predictive, intuitive traffic push notifications for users’ everyday trips, eliminating the need to manually check for traffic delays. The newest version of Scout is now available from Google Play for Android and iTunes for iOS.
The results of a new survey from Telenav underscore the common pain points of planning events, meet-ups and meetings for consumers — especially Millennials — which Telenav is aiming to help alleviate with the updated Scout app. Nearly half (49 percent) of Millennials reported that they would find it useful to have a single solution that enables them to plan an event, communicate with attendees while they’re en route, and see each other’s estimated time of arrival.
“Mobile users have come to expect more out of their navigation devices and applications,” said Rohan Chandran, president and general manager of Telenav’s mobile division. “Navigation alone is critical, but it is a commoditized utility. We are looking to embrace the things that people really care about — the experiences in real life for which you navigate. Getting together should not be hard work, and we are trying to solve that. Scout is the new way people connect, get together, and go places in real life. It’s the only app that takes you all the way from chatting, to making event plans, to getting together in person, complete with voice-guided GPS along the way and everyone’s whereabouts and ETA pinpointed on the map.”
Scout’s new in-application features include:
Socialized Navigation Experience. In addition to offering invitees voice-guided, turn-by-turn directions to the event destination, Scout offers real-time location and ETA insights so guests are able to view the positioning of other guests on the navigation map. This prevents a barrage of “Where are you?” texts and calls while en route — and eliminates questions about where directionally challenged or perpetually tardy friends are.
Easier Meet-Up Invitations. Scout replaces what typically requires multiple applications by conveniently taking care of all the details of getting together, from inviting guests on their contact lists, to picking a day, time and location. “Did I get an invite?” and “what time is the event taking place?” are the last questions that organizers will be asked.
Group Chat. For the friend who is always left out, Scout users can now chat with all of the other event attendees directly within the app, allowing them to avoid juggling multiple text and phone conversations, and easily adjust and discuss the details of an event.
Predictive, Personalized Traffic Reports (iOS Devices Only). Users can schedule traffic report updates informing them of road conditions for their regular drives, and recommended alternate routes.
