It has been an interesting month for developments in location. Nokia is looking for a buyer for HERE, the mapping and navigation business that once set the industry gold standard. While carriers are planning how they will comply with new FCC mandates for locating indoor E911 calls, the commercial indoor location market has moved beyond “emerging” and is well underway. It is a confusing ecosystem for buyers of indoor location solutions. And there is yet another mega-entry into the connected vehicle market, Alibaba and China’s SAIC Motor.
With the likely merger of Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia has started looking for a buyer for its digital map and LBS division. The mapping industry has changed dramatically since Nokia purchased the mapping leader Navteq in 2007. Google has become a mapping juggernaut, and less accurate free maps have become serviceable for many types of uses. In fall 2014, Nokia took a EUR1.2-billion impairment charge on HERE’s book value and now estimates the fair value for HERE at EUR2 billion. Possible buyers include Google, Microsoft, Apple and Uber, all companies with deep pockets and hardy appetites.
Indoor Location Market Is Messy. The indoor location market is pulling away from the station, as technology is ready and there are applications and use cases primed to get started. Unfortunately, the market is chaotic, teaming with companies offering solutions with various levels of accuracy, infrastructure requirements and cost. An ideal indoor location technology would provide at least 3-meter accuracy, be cost effective and fully universal, working anywhere on all devices. It doesn’t exist, but the competing technologies, all with trade-offs, will find applications that fit. For instance, the precision required in locating an apartment in the case of an E911 emergency call differs greatly from the pinpoint accuracy need by an app that directs a shopper to Lucky Charms cereal on an aisle crowded with boxes.
One Size Doesn’t Fit All. There is more to an indoor location technology than accuracy. “Accuracy is important, but so is universality, the ability to work everywhere and in all phones. So is cost, in terms of the investment required from a site deploying the technology,” asserts Bruce Krulwich of Grizzly Analytics. “Universal technologies can win in the market even if they’re less accurate, and technologies with cheaper infrastructure can win even if they’re less accurate than those with expensive infrastructure. High-end systems can deliver sub-meter accuracy to those willing to pay for it.” Grizzly Analytics just completed a comprehensive report on the indoor location market.
Test First. Each of the numerous companies vying for the indoor location market makes claims regarding accuracy, availability/coverage, latency and battery usage. Judicious companies that invest in indoor location systems would be wise to test the claims of vendors. “Making a fair comparison among different indoor location offerings is complex, and nuances in how the testing is performed need to be controlled to ensure an apple-to-apple comparison,” asserted Khaled Dessouky of ComVerity. “It is important to use an unbiased methodology that relates to your use cases.” Dessouky managed the neutral test bed for the FCC’s Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council (CSRIC) for indoor E911 calls.
Quuppa. An interesting highly accurate offering comes from Quuppa, a Finnish company with a bunch of high caliber researchers spun off from Nokia. Like some others, they are using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons, but add angle of arrival (AOA) algorithms that pump up the precision, which they self-report to be 30 centimeters to 1 meter. With this performance, Quuppa has been used in sports to track hockey pucks and athletes’ movements during game play for coaching, player load monitoring and infotainment that can be broadcast during the game. The use of this type of high-precision location in health care settings is compelling. Patient flow management, security and critical asset tracking can be improved with precise positioning technology. Quuppa is a system that likely wouldn’t be used in apps that locate a coffee shop at a mall, but for uses that demand high performance and can spare some expense, it is compelling.
And Yet Another Mega Entry. The number of companies vying for a piece of the connected-car market keeps expanding and getting more international. E-commerce giant Alibaba and SAIC Motor, China’s popular car maker, together set up a $160 million fund to develop “car on the Internet.” Alibaba will be leveraging its communications, entertainment, map and cloud-computing services. The company joins a group that includes Google, Apple, Baidu and Uber in challenging auto makers.
The National Association of Broadcasters meeting in Las Vegas draws 100,000 attendees annually, making it one of the largest trade shows in the country. However, besides timing and some very niche markets, it has not been a big show for location companies. That is, until now, when NAB welcomed drone manufacturers, all of which embed GPS in their flying aircraft.
Kevin Dennehy
LAS VEGAS — Commercial drones, a growing market for location companies, was one of the most popular topics at the National Association of Broadcasters Show, held here April 13-16.
The market for drones has grown nearly five times in the last few years, said Eric Cheng of DJI, which uses GPS in its virtual positioning system that monitors and controls the aircraft. The company markets what they call “flying cameras” that look suspiciously like drones. “The market was initially hobbyists, but now some major broadcast players are buying the cameras,” Cheng said at the Showstoppers trade event the day before NAB.
Most of the drones offer GPS-based automatic flight stabilization technology. Some even offer a long-range wireless signal and low-latency video transmission.
Many of the drones are programmed so they don’t go higher than mandated FAA rules or go into restricted, no-fly aviation zones — and all use GPS to do this. Some of the drones even return to the user automatically when their batteries run low.
DJI drone with embedded GPS.
DJI offers three cameras for the drones. The high-end Phantom 3 Advanced offers 1080P HD video at 60 frames per second. The 1080P version costs $995.
In terms of privacy and government regulation, U.S. regulators are way behind Europe, Cheng said. “Other countries are way ahead of the [United States] in terms of working with drone companies,” he said. “In terms of privacy, the step ladder was the first tool for the invasion of privacy. They haven’t outlawed step ladders.”
The slow U.S. regulatory process has forced some manufacturers to go to other countries to test their drones, said Roger Sollenberger, 3D Robotics’ editorial director. “[U.S. regulations] have moved slowly here — despite the government knowing about worldwide drone rollouts. In Japan, they have been using drones to crop dust for 20 years,” he said.
Furuno’s Don Hanham with GNSS modules at NAB.
To signal increased interest in the commercial drone market, 3D Robotics raised $70 million dollars in funding, led by investor Qualcomm, Sollenberger said. The company, which partnered with action camera giant Go Pro, says its Solo drones can be used not only by broadcast companies, but for railroad track and building inspections.
As GPS World reported, Furuno Electric Co.’s latest multi-GNSS receiver module, GN-87, has been adopted for the new quadcopter Bebop Drone. The broadcast market has been a good one for company’s timing products, drone integration and even weather prediction, said Don Hanham, a Furuno sales and marketing consultant.
Furuno is marketing its Doppler Weather Radar System for broadcast. The system allows weather predictors to follow the development of short, localized rainstorms and extreme weather conditions.
Booz Allen Hamilton Releases Report on 2015 Automaker Priorities
The era of automotive connectivity, and subsequent heavy competition, is the focus of Booz Allen Hamilton’s new report, “Getting the Customer Experience Right: Auto Industry Priorities in 2015.”
The company says that automakers should consider six key priorities this year: deliver innovation in months, not model years; differentiate with new partnerships to catch customers’ attention; secure connectivity to reinforce a relationship of trust with customers; address the “so what” of connected cars; personalize the customer experience via the tremendous potential buried in data; and find and build the market for alternative fuel vehicles.
In terms of big connected vehicle technologies this year, Jon Allen, a principal with Booz, cites 4G pipe in GM and Audi vehicles and over-the-air updates by Ford and BMW, among others. “New parental controls in the Chevy Malibu report average speed and near misses while also preventing drivers from turning on the stereo until seatbelts are fastened. It’s easy to imagine this across vehicles, with parents receiving text messages in real time,” he said.
Allen said, in terms of vehicle connectivity, automakers must answer the “so what” to set themselves apart from the competition. “We have yet to see the seminal, game-changing connectivity plays. Most companies are still in the ‘features’ mindset, offering new à la carte enhancements,” he said. “They’re not yet articulating a top-down strategy for re-envisioning the customer experience with connectivity.”
One of the company’s six priorities concerns connected security, which has been a big industry issue since the recent release of the Markey Report, which focused on how vehicles can be hacked. “We have clients who get it. They’ve identified a senior leader to champion vehicle cyber security and backed them up with a cross-functional team that works closely with counterparts across the organization — in product engineering, supply chain, safety, privacy and IT,” Allen said. “Other OEMs are still formulating their approach. That said, there are pockets of cyber security across every organization, focused on implementing security controls on individual parts. The challenge is taking the next step —moving from this segmented, ‘assembly line approach’ to a more unified program that focuses on securing the complete vehicle ecosystem.”
Allen said the company has to speak honestly to customers and regulators about how to manage vehicle cyber security risk. “Industry leaders must prioritize their security approach to ensure that higher risk scenarios are addressed first, rather than try to take on all elements of the challenge at once,” he said.
Another priority addresses the long lead times, by automakers, to develop and roll out new features, which is a challenge, Allen said. “Consumer electronics, telecommunications and software companies are redefining the traditional industry boundaries that once distinguished them from OEMs. These companies focus on connectivity and services from the start of their product design process,” he said. “The key for automakers going forward is to continue learning from these new competitors, particularly around rethinking the vehicle lifecycle, connected product design, and managing vehicle software updates after purchase. In the near future, automakers will need different approaches to building and enhancing infotainment systems that can keep pace with customer demands.”
The marriage of autonomy and connectivity is a game-changer, Allen said. “It isn’t just about plugging vehicles in to the Internet of Things. Autonomy transforms transportation,” he said. “When a car drives you, it becomes a retail outlet, a personal assistant, even a trusted chaperone — that all depends on getting both autonomy and connectivity right.”
The rise of autonomous vehicles gets to the fundamental need for industry leaders to be willing to reimagine their product, Allen said. “Autonomous capabilities are not just about engineering a safer, more efficient, and more appealing mode of transportation. That’s important, but it’s really about a distinctly different product, one that creates a sustained, services-based relationship with the customer,” he said. “It will focus on the driving experience not just behind the wheel, but sitting comfortably inside of a self-driving vehicle. The connected, autonomous vehicle will change automotive for the better — and forever.”
Allen said his company is seeing OEMs look beyond their individual vehicles to see the emerging connected society that includes ride sharing, multi-modal transportation and connected cities. “The way we go from point A to point B will look and feel drastically different 25 years from now; many OEMs are beginning to accept the change and embrace the challenge,” he said.
The world of indoor location continues to evolve, with a number of variations on when and under what circumstances you might be able to wander around your local mall getting directions to your favorite ice-cream store on your iPhone. Some malls are mapped, some are not, some (most) have Wi-Fi hot-spots and Bluetooth beacons, some may be in areas where outdoor directional beacon are being tested and their signals penetrate indoors. But the thing they have in common is that most seem to lose GPS/GNSS signals once you get a few tens of meters away from the front entrance.
Some companies have managed to make indoor location in your mall work with a combination of GPS, plus all the RF signals that can be received, plus using inertial and/or magnetic sensors in your mobile phone, and sometimes also with detailed indoor map-matching — but no-one seems to do this in a simple, consistent, reproducible way for any store wanting to ensure you arrive at their door, or for a telecommunication industry wishing to standardize how it works for E911 and then field it everywhere.
So I’ve actually been looking for an indoor location outfit who might have found a consistent solution that can work from place to place — by that I mean from mall to mall, city to city, country to country, even continent to continent, and every time after first set-up — and I suspect that I may have now found one.
The team at iPosi in Denver is still working on their solution, but they have run some pretty convincing demonstrations in some very challenging locations, so they may have found an inside edge that could take them many places (sorry, about that pun).
While iPosi’s headquarters are is in Denver, the company also has labs in Boulder and offices in Dallas. It hasn’t been around too long — since 2011 — but it has been busy filing patents for the key technologies that drive their location technology. Of 40 total patents in the pipeline, five have been granted or allowed, 15 are pending, and 20 more are in development. With only six employees, iPosi is a small outfit, but it also gets design assistance from a European design center for other GNSS signal designs.
One of the key GNSS elements the iPosi team has going for them is an in-house developed GPS receiver with a sensitivity of -175 dBm. If you could get any sort of a signal deep inside a building, it’s possible that they might be able to receive it. But, for sure, anything you would receive deep inside would be just multipath – right? There are other pieces to this story however.
The iPosi system design is based on mobile phone “small-cell” installations. The world now has around 100 million multi-floor buildings with an average of eight floors each, and most buildings present some level of attenuation for external mobile phone cell-tower signals — never mind GPS signals. Most of us should be familiar with having to leave meetings to get “bars.” holding the phone up against a window, walking around to catch reflected indoor signals, and eventually having to leave the building and be with a group of other people who are doing the same thing – looking for a clear cell-phone signal to make a call. In the Northern U.S. and Canada in the winter, this can even be hazardous to your health!
So small cells behave as basically indoor “repeaters” of mobile phone signals. iPosi believes that an average of four of these repeaters are needed to broadcast sufficient signal on each average building floor. So iPosi embeds each small cell with one of its high-sensitivity receivers. Once positioned indoors, and over time, the receivers self-locate inside the building. Currently, installation of small cells can be somewhat cumbersome and time consuming, but non-GPS small cells can be located during installation using traditional indoor surveying techniques — such as laser-based measurements. Either that, or no measurements are made at all, and no device location information is associated with a device.
Small-cell setup.
With each small cell equipped with a high-sensitivity receiver — with especially clever algorithms to differentiate and interpret multipath over time — each device goes to work transmitting repeater mobile-phone signals and eventually self-locates. Contained within these signals are each small-cell location, plus a timing message that allows any standards-compliant handset to calculate range to each transmitter and to perform an OTDOA (Observed Time Difference Of Arrival) position fix.
If the small-cell location at install is also fed into the GIS database for the building and, more importantly, for the local area, the E911 “dispatchable address” for that building has GPS-level accuracy. And first responders will also have numerous other small-cell location aids within the building.
Another detail is that the iPosi receiver uses A-GNSS (including ephemeris) data, so it only needs small snapshots of signal to deduce position. This means very low power consumption for positioning at the small cell, which is good because small cells are mostly battery powered.
So, does it work? In FCC E911 demonstrations at the Omni Hotel in San Francisco, iPosi consistently located to within 50 meters horizontally and a few meters vertically.
Masonry, turn-of-20th-century construction
Approximately 15 floors, similar to surrounding
Test site: ninth floor hotel room
Horizontal error = 38 m, Vertical error = 9.5 m
There were several other tests in representative converted apartments, a modern four-story steel and concrete building, and inside a university auditorium. But the one that really caught my attention was the test iPosi ran in the basement of an engineering center.
Engineering center, lower basement 3.5 m below grade.
That’s 3.5 meters below grade! The iPosi receiver measurement system was able to determine that some of the signals were actually received directly from a GPS satellite — unbelievable! That’s through concrete and stone down to 3.5 meters below grade with a simple patch antenna!
Most of your average mall locations are not as location-hazardous as this basement test. Its possible that finding your way to the closest indoor ice-cream store could soon be child’s play, which will be especially helpful for the kids with smartphones.
iPosi is working with some of the key equipment suppliers in the industry. It’s quite likely that some of its evaluation sites could soon evolve into operational indoor location facilities. And iPosi’s argument is that its indoor location solution is truly scalable or can be readily standardized — as the telecom companies apparently would love for all indoor location technology to be — so the iPosi solution can readily transition across borders and countries, and roll out could be greatly simplified.
Tony Murfin
Hard to say if this will be the winning indoor location solution, but in the end the market will decide if it really is a scalable, simple solution, and if it will succeed — right?
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — I had the pleasure of having an early breakfast on this beautiful Colorado morning with Mark Stewart, VP and program manager at Lockheed Martin in Denver for the GPS III program. Mark was very upbeat, a normal state for him actually, and stated that GPS III SV1 was fully integrated — payload, bus and propulsion segments — on April 7, and “all is proceeding according to plan.”
“SV1 is ready to begin environmental testing at the vehicle level and there are no liens going forward,” Mark said. “There are no current issues or concerns.”
Currently, the schedule calls for SV1, per Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) mandate (read that as Lt. Gen. Sam Greaves) to process through acoustic testing to simulate the acoustics of launch and early orbit maneuvers. Then the complete vehicle will endure a rigorous thermal vacuum testing procedure that should be completed by this summer (2015).
Barring any major anomalies, I am still predicting that SV1 will be through tests by the end of this calendar year. That is not a LMCO prediction as much as it is mine. With that schedule intact, SV1 should be ready for launch by the first quarter of the calendar year 2016. Great news. I will have photos of the mated segments, which make up GPS III SV1, as soon as they are cleared for release. More later.
As I write this, the 31st Space Symposium (SS) will kickoff in just 5 days, on April 13 at the incomparable Broadmoor Resort in Colorado Springs, Colo., at the foothills of the beautiful Rocky Mountains.
Neil deGrasse Tyson (courtesy of PBS)
If you haven’t figured it out already, the 31st SS is not a WWII German unit designation, but the 31st Space Symposium, which Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, famed astrophysicist, bestselling author, director of the Hayden Planetarium and host of the hugely successful television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, simply calls “the most awesome symposium in the world.” Very high praise indeed, and a sentiment with which I totally agree.
Breaking Records
This year’s Space Symposium, which is sponsored by the Space Foundation, will be the largest ever held in terms of venue, size (number of exhibitors and speakers) and attendance. Approximately 10,000 space enthusiasts are expected to attend, and I hope you are one of them. My sources tell me the classified sessions (Cyber 1.5 and classified space sessions) are filled to overflowing — no new registrations allowed there. The exhibitor space at the Ball Aerospace Exhibit Center and Pavilion is bursting at the seams. The organizers are turning exhibitors away, so better luck next year. But if you just want to attend the greatest space symposium in the world, bar none, there is still time to register.
By the way, if you haven’t figured it out already, this is a truly international event. My sources at the Space Foundation stated that the 31st Space Symposium will have more international participation than ever, including more than 150 exhibits of the world’s latest space technology, products and services. The Ball Aerospace Exhibit Center will host more than 30 first-time exhibitors with more than a dozen countries represented, including: Austria, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Scotland, Sweden, Turkey, the UK and the U.S. The symposium is expected to attract space leaders from more than 25 countries, representing all sectors of the global space community.
Everyone who is anyone in the space world will probably be there or be represented. Consequently, the networking capabilities are unparalleled. Not to mention just being able to avail yourself of the world-famous Broadmoor Resort hospitality, plus the crisp, clean and cool mountain air at 6,000 feet.
Event Preparation
For many years, the event was known as the National Space Symposium. It outgrew that moniker many years ago, and is now simply known as the Space Symposium.
Every year before I attend the Space Symposium, I make a “ToDoToDay” list of topics I want to explore, both as a journalist and in my senior space analyst profession. Plus, of course, I make a list of people I definitely want to talk with or interview. This year, I thought I would share some of those to-dos with you, because you may indeed have some of the same interests.
GPS III
Mark Stewart, Lockheed Martin GPS III program manager (courtesy of Lockheed Martin)
Wearing my subject matter expert (SME) hat, so to speak, I recently had the honor of touring the Lockheed Martin (LMCO) Space Systems facility in Waterton Canyon (far West Denver), Colorado, where the GPS III satellites are built, integrated and otherwise readied for launch. I took the opportunity to chat with Mark Stewart and his crew. Mark is vice president for manufacturing and space systems and program manager for GPS III.
I learned that the first GPS III space vehicles (SVs) is much farther along than most everyone thinks. The problematic MDU (Mission Data Unit — the heart of the system) from Exelis has been fully tested and integrated into the payload. GPS III SV1 was only three days from being totally integrated or mated, as they say, with the on-orbit propulsion portion of the payload (the remainder of the LMCO A2100 bus) and beginning its months-long testing, certification and verification process. According to Mark, GPS III SV-01 — which powered on initially in February 2013 — now is in integration and test flow leading up to final delivery to the Air Force.
While it was thrilling to see everything finally coming together, I will also tell you candidly that the next milestone everyone is asking about, the first GPS III launch date, is probably as fluid as the Snake River in Spring. So, while I do not feel comfortable quoting a first launch date, and LMCO would not give me a firm date for delivery of the first GPS III SV, I do feel comfortable making this prediction: Barring any unforeseen major issues during testing, LMCO will be ready to deliver to the U.S. government the first ready-to-launch GPS III satellite by the end of this calendar year. That’s right, in my humble opinion the first GPS III SV will be ready to deliver to the Air Force by December 2015. When it will actually be launched is anybody’s guess; obviously, the sooner the better. Apropos of the Boeing IIF initial launches and critical on-orbit anomalies, the sooner the LMCO GPS III is put into orbit for full-scale operational and mission analysis tests the better.
LADO and OCX
The critical question of course is: Will the U.S. Air Force (USAF) have a ground control system that can successfully and reliably launch and support a full-up GPS III SV by the end of 2015? Certainly not if they stay the course with OCX, but there are alternatives, and you know who you are! Can you say LADO, Launch/Early Orbit, Anomaly Resolution, Disposal and Operations System?
Consider that LADO has been utilized to launch GPS satellites as far back as the GPS IIR-M family of satellites, also produced by LMCO, one of which was successfully launched on October 17, 2007, using the then-new LADO system. That milestone ensured the GPS program continued to provide superior space-based navigation for billions of users, military, civilian and commercial, around the globe using industry-leading highly modified (Aces Premier) commercial launch technology. This significant achievement was the culmination of outstanding teamwork between the USAF, Braxton Technologies, the engineering firm and the prime contractor.
The LADO system formed and is still the backbone of the new GPS Command and Control (C2) functionality implemented by the prime contractor. It known today as the Advanced Architecture Evolution Plan (AEP). Subsequently, LADO is now the primary launch system for all current and future (IIR-M, IIF and possibly GPS III) satellites, which should allow the U.S. Air Force to retire some outdated legacy GPS ground support and command and control systems.
The first successful 2007 LADO launch and control of an operational GPS IIR-M satellite, and the 1SOPS and 2SOPS operators’ acceptance of the GPS LADO system, was proof that commercial software can be deployed effectively even in a militarily critical mission system, saving the government both cost and schedule without sacrificing mission-unique capabilities.
In my humble opinion, that is where we need to go today. Let’s return to the tried-and-true LADO and prime contractor partnership and launch the first GPS III SV by the end of this year, or certainly by early 2016. Please notice I have not made any statements concerning scrapping the hugely expensive, 100-percent-over-budget-and-schedule (years behind) OCX program of record. Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics (USDATL) Frank Kendall recently announced the controversial decision that OCX as the program of record would go forward under strict scrutiny with definite milestones that must be met. Scrutiny is a fickle mistress, and historically on the OCX program, milestones are there to be missed. Meanwhile, the USAF requires a tried, proven and utterly reliable capability to launch GPS III SVs as soon as the first few become available. The USAF must place several GPS IIIs on orbit for a full checkout to ensure there are no major anomalies. Currently, LADO had an eight-year proven track record with no failures, and it remains the only program that can initiate, control and dispose of residual GPS satellites — including the IIAs, which are the longest lived GPS satellites on orbit today.
Beware, there will be many naysayers in government circles, and you may meet some of them at the symposium, that will tell you it is just not possible. But just stop by and talk candidly with LMCO Space Systems and Braxton Technologies personnel, and see what they have to say. You may be surprised by what you hear.
Then stop by the Raytheon booth and check on the status of OCX.
Lynn Dugle (courtesy of Raytheon)
Female Executives in the News
Speaking of OCX and Raytheon, Lynn Dugle retired from Raytheon on March 2, 2015. Historically, Lynn has been a very capable executive. She is the former president of Raytheon’s Intelligence, Information and Services (IIS) business, which handles several key U.S. Air Force space contracts, including OCX, the current program of record for the next-generation ground system for GPS III. Dugle served as president of the division beginning in 2009.
David Wajsgras (your guess is as good as mine), Raytheon’s former senior vice president (SVP) and chief financial officer (CFO), has replaced Dugle. Wajsgras served as SVP and CFO of Raytheon Company from March 2006 to March 2015.
David Wajsgras (courtesy of Raytheon)
As a member of Raytheon’s senior leadership team, he directed Raytheon’s overall financial strategy. In my humble opinion, he has his work cut out for him. He will need all of his financial expertise and acumen to make OCX a success — financially and, hopefully, operationally. The program is grossly over budget, several years behind schedule, and reportedly, my sources tell me, far less capable than originally planned. Good luck, David.
As long as we are still speaking primarily of female executives with great track records, USAF Lieutenant General Ellen Pawlikowski, who I have had the honor of knowing and working with for the past 25 years, was recently nominated for her fourth star. General Pawlikowski successfully commanded the SMC (Space and Missile Systems Center) and served as Program Executive Officer (PEO) for Space for three years at Los Angeles Air Force Base in California. Among her many successful space acquisition programs, she was responsible for GPS procurement during her tenure.
Lt. Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski, USAF (courtesy of the USAF)
Currently, General Pawlikowski serves on the East Coast in the Pentagon as the military deputy to William LaPlante, Ph.D., the assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition. In other words, LaPlante is the Air Force’s Service Acquisition Executive, responsible for all Air Force research, development and acquisition activities. Previously, just to add to her mystique, General Pawlikowski spent more than one tour at the super secret National Reconnaissance Office.
When confirmed, General Pawlikowski will be only the third female four-star general in U.S. Air Force history. A well-deserved honor and one that certainly merits acknowledgement. General Pawlikowski is scheduled to speak several times at the Space Symposium, so when you see her, congratulate her on a job well done and on being nominated for her fourth star, and wish her luck in her new assignment as the head (four-star commander) of Air Force Materiel Command.
Before we leave the female leader category, my sources tell me that USAF Colonel DeAnna Burt, commander of the 2nd Space Operations Squadron (2 SOPS, the GPS squadron) from 2008 to 2010, will in June 2015 become only the third female commander of the 50th Space Wing at Schriever AFB, Colorado — home to 2 SOPS. She follows in the very capable footsteps of then-Colonel Suzanne (Zan) Vautrinot, who was the first female wing commander at the50th Space Wing followed by then-Colonel Teresa (Terry) Djuric. Note that both Suzanne and Terry, who are now retired from active duty, went on to become general officers in the USAF.
Commander AFSPC – Gen. John Hyten (courtesy of the USAF)
Currently, Colonel Burt serves as director of the Air Force Space Command (AFSPC) Commander’s Action Group for General John Hyten. General Hyten, the current commander of AFSPC, is himself a former 50th Space Wing commander, and he will also be speaking several times at the space symposium. Here’s a big hint: As a four-star general, General Hyten has morphed into quite a forceful, informative, entertaining and engaging speaker. You won’t want to miss any of his presentations.
If you see Colonel Burt at the Space Symposium, please congratulate her on her new assignment, and you might offer her your prayers for the incredible amount of responsibility she is about to assume. I’m betting she can handle it.
GPS Directorate
Another USAF general officer you are sure to run into at the Space Symposium is a newly minted brigadier general known by some as Wild Bill Cooley. General Cooley, who is currently the director of the GPS Directorate at SMC, was pinned on just a few weeks ago and will be speaking several times at the symposium. Wild Bill also deserves your congratulations. By all accounts, he is doing a great job and has more stars in his future.
The Place to Be
So, while there are several points to be made, a key one appears to be that if you are heavily involved with the GPS program inside and outside the USAF and you do a good job, it can work wonders for your career. If you want to hear from those who have been successful, the 31st Space Symposium is the place to be.
I hope to see you at the Broadmoor April 13-16. Come early and wear your walking shoes. Please stop by the GPS World booth and say hello to everyone. I will be there for sure.
As I wind up this to-do list, I will tell you about another Space Symposium event where it is important, even critical, to be seen. Everyone who is anyone will be attending the Connecting Colorado private function on Wednesday evening, April 15. The event is hosted by the Braxton Science and Technology Group; this is the third year for the coveted event. As I have stated before, I have attended 26 of the 31 Space Symposiums, and I have never been to an after-hours function during that time that even approaches the quality and class that Connecting Colorado exudes. It is a first-class event in a visually stunning venue, where private access passes are required to enter and guards are serious about keeping out gatecrashers. If history is any guide, it promises to be an amazing evening of fine wines, sumptuous food, quality cigars, roaring fireplaces and professional camaraderie that can’t be beat. Plus, the networking opportunities are endless. In other words, the Connecting Colorado event is what all the other after-hours Space Symposium events long to be or wish they could emulate. I can’t wait. I hope to see you there, and at the 31st Space Symposium. By the way, April in the Rocky Mountains means dress appropriately — warmly works for me.
Until next time, Happy Navigating, and remember: GPS is brought to you courtesy of the United States Air Force.
The unmanned drone RQ-4 Global Hawk in flight in 2007 (Image credit: U.S. Air Force photo by Bobbi Zapka)
By Art Kalinski, GISP
For more than a decade, the military has been struggling with cataloging and retrieving its huge libraries of full motion video (FMV). The video, captured by both manned and unmanned aircraft, rapidly reached unmanageable levels. If you have ever tried to organize vacation photos after returning home from a long trip, you know that it’s easy to lose track of where each photo was taken. Date/time stamps help, but the effort is still difficult if your vacation took you to numerous locations.
The manned U.S. Air Force Beech King Air 350 and 350ER MC-12W Project Liberty Aircraft are designed for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR).
Now imagine trying to retrieve several critical minutes out of thousands of hours of video of barren land or repetitive-looking villages, and you get a sense of the magnitude of the problem. Without some way to catalog the video, critical details can be lost, because finding the right video clip becomes impossible in a reasonable period of time. Everyone agreed that the solution to the problem is to index the video clips by date/time and location, preferably with an exact georeferenced footprint. This is now possible with tools from Esri, Hexagon Geospatial and others.
Several years ago, at the USGIF GEOINT Tech Days, Sarnoff (SRI) demonstrated a system that pinned aerial video to its geographic footprint and maintained that registration despite the movement of the aircraft. It was an achievement that impressed everyone in the audience. I changed jobs soon after that conference and lost track of developments in the FMV field. At the February Esri Federal Users Conference, I was thrilled to see Jack Dangermond briefly demonstrate the same kind of FMV georeferencing capability in ArcGIS 10.2 during his opening plenary session. I learned that Esri developed the capability in 2013, and later learned that Intergraph (Hexagon Geospatial) also developed a similar capability in 2010.
MISB: The Critical Improvement
The key technical development that made this possible was NGA’s creation of “Motion Imagery Standards” and the Motion Imagery Standards Board (MISB). The MISB developed standards for a consistent way to capture and record telemetry data during the video capture as metadata that becomes part of the video stream. This “Open Standard” metadata includes information such as the accurate xyz location of the aircraft, attitude, tilt, camera angle, and camera characteristics. This information travels with the individual video frames and permits the GIS/viewing software to perform the georeferencing.
This process is very similar to the oblique imagery capture system used for years by Pictometry, which at 20 FPS was technically FMV. MISB like Pictometry requires accurate GPS and IMU data to continuously capture and record the metadata. The MISB also gets involved with video compression standards such as the newer H.264 used on Blu-Ray discs and streaming video. H.264 has, for the most part, replaced MPEG2 and older MPEG4 as the video compression standard of choice. Much of the video captured by low-end small UAVs is just a simple video stream with no MISB telemetry data. However, I’m sure that lower prices, increased capability and smaller size of sensors will fix that with time. Sorry, no one has yet figured a way to “hack in” the metadata for legacy video captured without the MISB telemetry data. The one exception is those videos that contain usable telemetry data that was burned into the video and can be read with OCR. It might be possible to insert that information as MISB-compliant data.
The ArcGIS Full Motion Video Add-In
The ArcGIS Full Motion Video 1.2 Add-In (for ArcGIS 10.1, 10.2 and 10.3) is a free tool for ArcGIS users. It permits users to play georeferenced live or previously recorded video files in the map view. The screen capture below shows several features of this tool and is from an online video.
The re-sizeable smaller window displays the video as it runs. The map view shows a changing footprint (green trapezoid) of the video as the aircraft flies over the site. The short green line shows the flight path of the aircraft. Demonstrating the interconnectivity of the two data sets, the user in the demo video drew a light blue polygon on the map view. Note that the Esri Intersect function re-projects and displays the same polygon correctly in the video view.
Frames from the video can be extracted as single georeferenced images or groups of images and stored as a mosaic dataset. Playback of time-stamped video data can be synchronized with other time-enabled data and played together on the map. Features can be digitized directly on the video player and will appear on the map and vice versa.
The extension supports playback and management of multiple simultaneous video feeds. The Add-In also allows you to record the sensor, frame center, and footprint data in a geodatabase so the Bookmark Manager can perform searches for bookmarked video scenes. For more information regarding the Esri FMV tool, visit this ArcGiS site.
Hexagon Geospatial GeoMedia Motion Video Analyst Professional
Another robust FMV system that takes advantage of MISB telemetry is GeoMedia Motion Video Analyst Professional (MVA) from Hexagon Geospatial. The Hexagon Geospatial system includes tools to catalog videos as geospatial features with attributes extracted from the metadata, and has some elegant graphic selection tools that help an operator search and retrieve needed video clips.
In the screen capture below, you can see the map view with the geo-registered color video overlaid on the black-and-white ortho base image. As the video plays, the georeferenced video footprint continuously moves to the correct location as the tracking graphics in red show the position of the aircraft. The transparency of the video can be adjusted so an operator can compare features between the base image and the video and digitize directly in the map window.
MVA also includes a full set of tools for placing clipmarks as geospatial features with attributes and linked to the cataloged video, extracting snapshots and videos clips, on-the-fly enhancements, stabilization, registration and more. The system also facilitates rapid report generation so as an operator searches and plays appropriate video clips, the same operator or a partner can rapidly generate reports as documents or PowerPoint presentations in minutes. Another feature of the system is a “de-hazing” tool that removes a surprising amount of haze or smoke.
See a very good video overview of GeoMedia Motion Video Analyst Professional on this Hexagon Geospatial page. Like the Esri video, both are far better at explaining the capabilities than I can in this short column.
Other defense contractors are taking advantage of the MISB metadata, so check with your provider. Although these systems found their first home with military analysts, the Esri and Hexagon Geospatial reps indicated that many other users are finding the capability valuable in their work. Emergency operations centers come to mind first, but more mundane uses include rail and utility property management, the news media and video used in court proceedings. So, if you shoot lots of aerial video and need to catalog and retrieve video clips quickly, consider using MISB in your capture process.
When subjected to very strong interference, a GNSS receiver can be totally blinded and stop working. This is often the scope of intentional jammers. However, in a number of cases the presence of interference is severe enough to significantly decrease receiver performance, but not so much as to make the receiver lose its lock on the satellite signals or blind the acquisition of the satellite signals.
Such intermediate power values turn out to be the most dangerous cases, because sometimes they cannot be detected, but lead to a worsening of the positioning performance. The accuracy of the position solution depends on, among others, the quality of the pseudorange measurements and/or the phase measurements. Thus, when radio-frequency interference (RFI) degrades the pseudorange and phase measurements or induces cycle slips on the phase measurements, the accuracy of the position solution will decrease.
Impact on the Front End
The front-end filters the incoming signal, demodulating it to the chosen intermediate frequency before performing the analog-to-digital conversion (ADC).We must consider the presence in the front end of the adjustable gain control (AGC) between the analog portion of the front end and the ADC. When the GNSS band is interference-free, AGC gain depends almost exclusively on thermal noise, since the received signal power is below that of the thermal noise floor. When in-band interference is present, the AGC will squeeze the incoming signal to match the maximum dynamics of the ADC, causing a reduction of the amplitude of the useful signal, which may be lost. This may typically happen in the presence of some kind of wide-band interference (WBI) spread over a bandwidth larger than the passband of the front-end filter.
With narrow-band (NBI) or continuous-wave interference (CWI), statistics of the digital signal at the ADC output are also affected. In this case the AGC can still compress the input signal to avoid a stronger saturation, but the following receiver stages will have to deal with a GNSS contribution quantized only on lower levels.
In the presence of stronger interference, even the other components of the front end (filters and amplifiers) may be led to work outside of their nominal regions, generating nonlinear effects or clipping phenomena (in which the signal amplitude exceeds the hardware’s capability to treat them). In both cases, spurious harmonics are generated and mixed with the useful signal in the front end itself.
Impact on the Acquisition Stage
If the interference is not driving the AGC/ADC to full saturation, the acquisition module is still able to perform its task, processing the interfered signal to estimate the code phase and the Doppler shift with respect to the local code. The correlation with the local code can be seen as a spreading operation followed by a filter.
Figure 1. GPS L1 C/A acquisition search space in (a) an interference-free environment and in the presence of (b) –140 dBW in-band CWI; (c) –135 DBW in-band CWI; (d) –130 dBW in-band DWI.
Figure 1 showsthe acquisition search space for different levels of theinterfering power of a CWI from –140 to –130 dBW compared to the interference-free case. The search spaces depicted for the four scenarios are achieved using 1 ms of coherent integration time and three non-coherent accumulations, and the peak-to-noise-floor separation defined as
is considered as a figure of merit. The value of αmean decreases as the interfering power increases, thus increasing the probability of a false alarm. With the increasing power of the CWI, a modulation effect in the search space floor in the Doppler domain dimension can be observed. Such an effect is mainly determined by the new harmonics components generated by the multiplication between the locally generated carrier and received CWI. Such an effect also depends on how the interfering signal and the useful GNSS signal are combined at the entrance to the acquisition block, which in turn depends on the random variables φ0 and θint.
In the presence of WBI, a different effect is observed in the acquisition search space. Considering a band-limited Gaussian white noise spread all over the GNSS useful filtered signal components, the effect on the CAF envelop is an increase in the noise floor. This increases the search space noise floor. The presence of additive band-limited noise causes a uniform increase in the noise floor tin the search space that might mask the correct correlation peak and thus fool the acquisition process.
Impact on the Tracking Stage
Interference impact on the tracking stage has a direct consequence on the quality of the measured pseudorange. Harmful interfering signals increase the variance of the time-of-arrival (TOA) estimate by the discriminator and modify the shape of the S-curve of the code discriminator, thus creating in some cases a bias in the measurements.
Figure 2 depicts outputs of the early-prompt-late correlators. In the presence of in-band CWI and of NBI, the interference is injected 9.3 seconds after the beginning of the tracking stage where the receiver is correctly locked on the received signal. A CWI, shifted 200 kHz with respect to the signal intermediate frequency (in correspondence with a C/A code spectrum line), increases the noise at the correlators outputs and leads to harmonic behavior of the early-prompt-late correlator outputs.
Figure 2. GPS L1 C/A code tracing error comparison: coherent and non-coherent early-late processing (CELP and NELP).
NBI increases the variance of the correlators’ outputs; this directly increases the pseudorange error and the noise on the receiver phase measurements. Additive band-limited noise leads to an overall increase in the carrier phase discriminator output variance over the 3σ threshold, which for a PLL two-quadrant arctangent discriminator is 45 degrees. When in presence of strong CWI, a sudden jump of the phase discriminator output is detected as soon as the CWI is injected onto the received signal.
Impact on the Estimated Signal-to-Noise Ratio
Sticking to the definition of C/N0 as the ratio between the received power and the power spectral density due to thermal noise at the input of the receiver, the presence of interference should not change the value, since the thermal noise is not increasing. However, the C/N0 value provided by the receivers is estimated on the basis of the correlator outputs at the tracking stage. For this reason the estimation is affected by the presence of the additional (nonthermal) noise generated by the interference. The variation of the C/N0 can also be used as observable for interference (or other threats) detection.
Chapters: The Interference Threat; Classification of Interfering Sources and Analysis of the Effects on GNSS Receivers; The Spoofing Menace; Analytical Assessment of Interference on GNSS Signals; Interference Detection Strategies; Classical Digital Signal Processing Countermeasures to Interference in GNSS; Interference Mitigation Based on Transformed Domain Techniques; Antispoofing Techniques for GNSS. The book is intended for members of the engineering/scientific community with pre-existing knowledge of satellite navigation principles and GNSS.
FabIo Dovis holds a Ph.D. in elecronics and communications engineering from Politecnico di Torino, Italy, where he is an associate professor.
Image showing projected Florida flooding, from flood.firetree.net, using Google Earth with NASA data. Image from flood.firetree.net, using Google Earth.
Surveyors, prepare to get your feet wet. Global warming is about to hit you in the job list. By 2050, a majority of U.S. coastal areas are likely to be threatened by 30 or more days of flooding each year. This according to a December report in Earth’s Future, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
[Parenthetically, the next issue of Survey Scene, in May, will be written by an actual geodesist. Until then, you have to put up with GPS World’s editor in chief — by no means a surveyor. Patience.]
The study used data from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) tide gauges to show the annual rate of coastal floods has accelerated in recent years. These are now five to 10 times more likely today than 50 years ago — and getting worse.
Mitigation decisions could range from retreating further inland to coastal fortification or to a combination of “green” infrastructure using both natural resources such as dunes and wetland, along with “gray” man-made infrastructure such as sea walls and redesigned storm water systems. And that’s not even mentioning such basics as redrawing property lines. Any way you look at it, surveyors are going to be involved.
“As communities across the country become increasingly vulnerable to water inundation and flooding, effective risk management is going to become more heavily reliant on environmental data and analysis,” said Holly Bamford, NOAA acting assistant secretary for conservation and management.
The recent U.S. Hydro 2015 conference in National Harbor, Maryland — an area particularly called out for vulnerability to the oncoming floods — naturally found a lot to talk about in this and related areas of interest for surveyors, with session tracks including: Effects of Climate Change on our Oceans and Waterways; Coastal and Ocean Mapping Initiatives; Advances in Unmanned System Technology, and several more.
Some of the papers presented that GPS World found of interest, and hopes to present or encapsulate in some form in the near future, include:
Resolving Systematic GPS Interference from Aeronautical Distance Measuring Equipment during Mission-Critical Shallow Water Multibeam Surveys
GPS Water-Level Buoy for Hydropgraphic Survey Operations
Examining the Uncertainty Associated with the Establishmenbt of an Ellipsoid to Chart Datum Separation Surface Using GNSS Buoys
Comparison of Horizontal and Vertical Resolvable Resolution between Repetitive Multibeam Surveys Using Different Kinematic GNSS Methods.
And those just came from the poster sessions. In the technical sessions, Jack Riley from the NOAA Coast Survey’s Hydrographic Systems and Technology Program presented a GPS Buoy Water Level Uncertainty Case Study.
Data from on High
Since you can’t get at a coastline from all angles — with any degree of stability, that is — data from overhead, sometimes far overhead, proves invaluable. Such as that provided by aerial digital imagery, LiDAR, and increasingly, satellites.
Because digital aerial images are already in electronic form, they can quickly be processed and made available to users. Most of the special cameras in use nowadays provide direct georeferencing capability, which allows camera position and orientation to be determined automatically using GPS and inertial measurement equipment. An entire mini-industry has grown up around integrating aerial data with that taken from ground surveys.
Light detection and ranging (LiDAR), a remote sensing system, became available for commercial topographic mapping in 1993. An airborne laser scanning system paired with a kinematic GPS receiver and an inertial navigation system can calculate and produce a highly accurate spot elevation. It is possible to obtain point densities that would likely take months to collect using traditional ground survey methods. The National Geodetic Survey (NGS) is currently implementing LiDAR into their shoreline mapping production process.
Our Record So Far
Coverage of these salty issues has been sparse in GPS World and associated newsletters, but not entirely absent. In 2006, the May issue featured “GPS Buoys Nautical Measurement.”
In 2008, Richard Langley edited an Innovation column on “Tsunami Detection by GPS,” featuring work for which co-author Attila Komjathy eventually won a GPS World Leadership Award in 2013. And in 2010, Langley brought forth an Innovation column on “Monitoring Water Level with GNSS.”
And way, way back in 2005, we published “Abreast of the Waves: Open-Sea Sensor to Measure Height and Direction.” This was prior to our digital era, so until we can scan a paper copy into here, we’ll simply give the abstract: “Accurate and timely information on open-sea wave conditions can help in preventing large-scale maritime disasters. This article describes a new, low-cost Global Positioning System (GPS)-based sensor that measures wave height with an accuracy of several centimeters and direction with an accuracy of 5 degrees. The receiver is mounted on a buoy, and a high-pass filter is used to extract the movement of the buoy and thus minimize GPS positioning errors. The data provided by the sensor is intended to improve wave prediction models. In addition, since this GPS-based sensor transmits only analyzed ocean wave data, it reduces the volume of data and leads to lower operating and acquisition costs. The article describes the concept of the GPS-based wave sensor, algorithms that are used for filtering and extracting wave data, as well as the results of open-sea trials.”
So there’s more to come. Watch this space. In the meantime, we leave you with Bob Dylan’s prophetic words, circa 1967.
Well, it’s sugar for sugar And salt for salt If you go down in the flood It’s gonna be your own fault.
Sessions on indoor navigation and a keynote from Google at February’s International Navigation Conference (INC15), organised by the Royal Institute of Navigation, addressed the revised E911 positioning requirements in the United States, and flowed over into speculation about E112 emergency calling parameters in Europe’s near future.
According to the 2014 U.S. Federal Communications Commission report, 75 percent of 911 calls now come from mobile phones, more than half of those originate indoors, and around 1 percent of emergency calls contain no location information from the caller (due to distress, confusion, language issues, illness, and so on). The report estimates 10,000 deaths per year in the United States might have been avoided if a landline had been used instead, since location information for landlines can be provided confidently.
Discussion in the breaks of INC highlighted a misunderstanding amongst some parties that E911 mandates the use of GPS for position location determination. In fact,E911 does not mandate any specific technology; it specifies performance criteria in terms of accuracy that must be met. The recently revised performance criteria include indoor performance, and some of the technology discussed at the INC is able to meet these requirements without using GNSS at all.
This could be troublesome for Europe, which is looking at the imposition of Galileo as part of an A-GNSS technology push for the E112 application. The real problems, discussed during INC and in European consultation processes with safety of life services such as E112, are:
the accuracy of the position derived by the device and/or network, and
the timeliness of the delivery of that position to the Public Service Answering Point (PSAP).
The E911 directives address these points directly, and the infrastructure in the cellular networks is in place. Does simply implementing a Galileo capability into a European mobile device solve these problems?
In many outdoor cases, implementing Galileo can bring benefits, including signal diversity. And of course the E112 proposal is greater than just “adding Galileo.” It does address the second problem of timeliness of delivery and data transfer, but there are significant infrastructure upgrades required across Europe for the provision of this location data to the PSAPs.
What the E112 processes do not currently do is specify performance criteria for the position location accuracy. This means that the position estimate provided under E112 is likely to be a cell-ID fix, with an accuracy ranging from hundreds of meters to dozens of kilometers.
Galileo on Mobiles. Further discussion during the conference delved into the realms of the specifics of implementing A-GNSS, including Galileo, onto a mobile device. Conversations centered around if any future E911 or E112 positioning capability would be aligned around a single-chip solution as generally currently deployed on a device, or if some of the functions will be moved up the stack into the operating system (OS) of the device, into software.
Most opinions were against this latter concept, and a panel at the ION GNSS+ last year in Florida concluded the same thing. However, questions were asked about some ideas relating to identifying the emergency number at the time of dialing and then starting the position location determination functions in readiness for the need to provide the device location. This addresses the first bullet point earlier, the accuracy of the position derived by the device and/or network. If this is carried out in the OS or software layers, vulnerability of the system will be increased overall as the OS of a mobile device is a target for the cyber criminal community.
A robust software-based solution is, however, being rolled out in the United Kingdom in the form of eSMS, bringing mobile operators, government and handset vendors together to provide location data via SMS to the PSAP. The advantage of this approach is that no new standards or major infrastructure changes are required, and the time to implement is small.
Further discussions established that future chipsets are likely to use whatever GNSS signals are available, regardless of whether they are GPS, Galileo, GLONASS, Beidou and so on. This, coupled with new signal processing techniques (single-frequency observable for example), increasing sensor clustering on devices, and user demand for services, may make the use of a specific GNSS system above others somewhat redundant. Certainly picking up on a point made by Chandu Thota from Google, GNSS is “not relevant” for their indoor positioning solutions, and technologies they are working on, in both hardware and mapping improvements, are looking at meeting indoor accuracy requirements down to a target requirement of 1 meter, without GNSS.
Taking these points into account, questions were asked from the floor of the conference about the legal position of the EC mandating Galileo as a positioning method as well as the willingness of the global mobile chipset and device industry to be told what to do. Perhaps specifying strong performance criteria, as in the United States, is the way forward to “reboot” the European E112 system. No one disputes that a properly functioning E112 is a life saver and a good thing to do; however, the points discussed here detail some of the concerns expressed during and after hours at INC15.
In February 2015, the Royal Institute of Navigation hosted the International Navigation Conference in Manchester, UK. Keynotes at this well-attended conference included Harold Martin, director of the GPS Coordination Office; Gian Gherardo Calini, the head of market development at the European GNSS Agency; Todd Humphreys from the University of Texas; Chandu Thota from Google; and others. The conference covered multiple technology tracks including indoor navigation, autonomy, quantum technology and the resilience of GNSS systems.
Andy Proctor is lead technologist for satellite navigation at InnovateUK, the UK’s innovation agency. He acknowledges Ramsey Faragher, Cambridge University, for help in the preparation of this article.
We have entered a discussion phase at the magazine, a fierce conversation if you will, occasioned on the one hand by the periodic need to freshen our appearance, but also to re-investigate and re-evaluate our whole approach. The way we do things, and the actual things we do. The thoughts and pre-conceptions and mental equipment we carry with us to do our jobs: gathering and presenting the news and the newest in GNSS technology and business.
In the beginning, or before the beginning, really, I asked myself these questions:
What has changed in the last year?
Where are we succeeding?
Where are we failing?
What have we learned in the last six months?
What is required of us now?
Some of the answers to these questions are of course proprietary, but some at least can be shared. So: What has changed in the last year — in the market?
Among new developments, we can count diversification away from the core of GPS/GNSS standalone technology. Never again, really, will satnav positioning suffice to answer the needs of the day. That ship has sailed. That dog has left the porch.
Certainly, though this is nothing new, we also see more international participation in the market, more international involvement on the part of all GNSS companies, no matter where their base, and more international collaboration.
The story of the year, replacing jamming and interference which were the stories of the last few years, is the rise of unmanned autonomous vehicles (UAVs), whether in the air, on land, or sea.
Finally, as a reflection of these trends, some trade shows and conferences are declining, while others grow in importance, attendance, and exhibitors.
In the context of future change, here’s a question I’d like to ask all of our readers. I welcome your answers to any of the questions you see posed here, or any thoughts at all, even if they consist of more questions. Send all and sundry to: editor @ gpsworld.com
But if you wouldn’t mind, please include this one:
Where do you see your efforts and those of your organization focusing primarily over the next five to 10 years?
A. Primarily on GPS.
B. Inclusive also of multiple GNSS: GLONASS, Galileo, BeiDou, various satellite-based augmentation systems.
C. More broadly, on positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) systems generally and in an integrated fashion, including other sensors.
D. Encompassing all the above and geospatial software such as geographic information systems (GIS) and location-based services (LBS).
Skipping ahead now to some outcomes, under the heading of what is required of us now, we here at the magazine are leaning more every day on these precepts:
Grow digitally and grow internationally. These are the only true paths to growth, at least in business-to-business publishing.
First and foremost, let’s give a big hand to Adam and Anastasia, the two Galileo FOC satellites that were successfully launched on March 27. Following the not-so-successful Galileo launch in August, it was imperative that this go smoothly.
Although the Double-A launch occurred after the conclusion of this year’s Munich Satellite Navigation Summit, anticipation of the event set the context for the entire convocation. The summit is a fixture on the European and global GNSS calendar. It is always intense, often spectacular and sometimes leaves one with contradictory feelings. This year it took place March 24-26 and sought to determine the future of PNT, encouraging delegates to look into the crystal ball and predict developments.
If we go by the number of times these words were repeated during the three days of the summit, the future will hinge around compatibility and interoperability. The multi-constellation GNSS is already here. The elephant in the room remains, as always, interference, but here integration of alternative sensors and signals should hold the key to continuous and possibly resilient operations.
As usual the summit kicked off with a high-level plenary in the imposing Allerheiligen-Hofkirche (Court Church of All Saints) in the Residenz München, the Bavarian royal palace. The welcoming speeches and presentations were interspersed with some pleasant jazz, and the atmosphere was relaxed.
Into the Crystal Ball
Matthias Petschke, director of EU Satellite Navigation Programmes at the European Commission, admitted that 2014 had been difficult, but he was looking forward to 2015. Clearly the deployment of the Galileo infrastructure — especially the space segment — was critical, and the March 27 launch was very much on his mind. However, he expressed confidence that the launch would be fine and that satellite production was, and would remain, on schedule. In the long view, he stated: “We will make it for 2020,” signifying full operational capability (FOC).
He also talked about stimulating global markets to foster uptake of Galileo and EGNOS, and this was discussed by Carlo des Dorides, executive director of the European GNSS Agency (GSA). The ground infrastructure is very much in place and preparing for the Galileo exploitation phase. A significant milestone in that process would be finding the right partner to lead Galileo operations for the next ten years. A tender was now in process to find that organization or consortium. Des Dorides described the process as a competitive dialogue with the emphasis on finding a partner who can inspire new ideas and provide innovative solutions. The contract is big, worth around 1 billion euros.
Carlo des Dorides, Executive Director of the European GNSS Agency (GSA), discusses the 1 billion euro tender, now in process to find the organization or consortium to lead Galileo operations for the next ten years. Photo: GSA
He also emphasized the successes for EGNOS in the year. Almost 180 airports now benefit from EGNOS-enabled approaches and more than 70 percent of “GNSS-enabled” farmers in EU use the EU’s SBAS.
Johann-Dietrich Wörner, chairman of the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) — and the nominated next Director-General of ESA – highlighted the growing dependence of critical services on GNSS. In this context multiple systems were not a question of competition; it was all about redundancy and safety. Multi-GNSS improves availability, accuracy and reliability.
The view from the United States was given by Harold “Stormy” Martin, Director, National Coordination Office for Space-Based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing in Washington, D.C. The GPS fleet was now 30 strong in orbit including four successful launches in 2014 and he stated the 2014 averaged user range error to be 70 cms — the best ever — and improving year on year.
One major upcoming trend is a realization that there’s a need to establish a U.S.-wide backup coverage for GPS outage due to natural or man-made interference. The U.S. is currently assessing alternatives with a decision likely in summer 2015.
There was a particularly warm welcome from the audience for Michael Khailov, deputy head of Roscosmos and co-ordinator for GLONASS. Last year the Russians were conspicuous by their absence at the Munich Summit, but for 2015, despite the intervening local difficulty in Ukraine, they were back in force. Khailov claimed that the sustainable development of the world depends on GNSS. On more esoteric ground he stated that GLONASS had maintained stable operations in 2014 and three more satellites had bene launched. Further launches would depend on operational circumstances. The user domains for GLONASS were continuously expanding. Continuing the summit text he said that it was better [working] together than separately — in fact separately often doesn’t work at all and therefore we must continue to promote interoperability and the Munich Satellite Summit is a good forum for this.
Jianyun Chen of the China Satellite Navigation bureau also took up the theme of all GNSS together. Sixteen Beidou (pronounced — for the avoidance of doubt — as ‘bay-doe’) had been launched since 2007 and the Chinese had been in discussion with Russia to ensure full interoperability with GLONASS. This process will be repeated with GPS and Galileo.
GNSS Updates
One of the idiosyncrasies of the Munich Summit is its very discreet signage. If you don’t know where it is — and specifically the correct side door that brings you up two floors to the main Max Joseph Saal venue — it is highly likely you’ll miss it! But once you are in it is two full-on days of updates on systems and discussions on a vast range of topics that impinge on the development and implementation of GNSS around the world.
Discreet signage. Photo: GSA
The first two session of the summit proper gave updates on the GNSS systems in operation and under development as well as the regional and augmentation systems. Much of the material was slightly more detailed versions of presentations at the plenary but a few news snippet emerged.
“Stormy” Martin said that a modified battery charge control had been implemented that would extend operational life for some of the fleet by one or two years. He also reiterated the improving accuracy performance of GPS which was now much better that its published standards. He predicted that the first GPS III would be available for launch in 2016 and said that GPS was improving every day.
Eric Chatre from the European Commission reiterated that Galileo was still expecting to start early services in 2016 with full operational capability in 2020. He expected 18 satellites to be launched by 2018. The new Ariane 5 launcher will enable the launch of four satellites at one time and the first launch with this system would be in 2016. In terms of the ground segment only one station in the Pacific was yet to be established.
Sergey Karutin of Roscosmos talked about a four-fold accuracy improvement for GLONASS with the use of new clocks and the introduction of new CDMA signals that will improve accuracy and access. According to Dongfeng Yu of the China Satellite Navigation Office the BeiDou constellation is moving from “regional to global, active to passive” and is aiming for global coverage by 2020.
U.S. SBAS developments were covered by Deborah Lawrence of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) now has 100 percent coverage for LPV200 in CONUS. More than 41,000 runway ends are now included, and she predicted full completion in 2016.
Jean-Marc Pieplu of the GSA talked about EGNOS status. The next system release (2.4.1) should be published in Q3 2015 and will include a significant input on ionospheric corrections. Further service evolution includes a plan to declare LPV 200 in Q4 this year and EGNOS coverage will be extended to 72 deg North and ensure full coverage of the 28 EU member states.
The Russian Augmentation system SDCM performs at 0.8 metre accuracy according to Grigory Stupak of JSC / Russian Space Systems. He noted new validated SDCM ground stations had been established in Antarctica and Brazil and stated that global exploitation was a key objective for SDCM as its satellite coverage was very wide. GLONASS and GPS together could ensure complete coverage. He also indicated that work was in hand for SDCM SBAS service certification for LPV 200 and he called for providers of all WAAS to work closely together.
2020 Vision
After lunch we were offered the chance to hear some expert views on the future of GNSS and PNT with Prof Vidal Ashkenazi of Nottingham Scientific Limited asking for their vision of GNSS in 2020. By that year there should be 100-120 GNSS satellites in orbit, multi-constellation receivers would be the norm, but what would be the new applications and what were the challenges?
Jamming and spoofing would still be issues. Pierre Bouniol of Thales thought that in civil aircraft receivers would probably incorporate jamming indicators by 2020 to inform users when signals may be compromised. For Stuart Riley of Trimble the key was integration of other sensor signals to bridge any GNSS signal outage. Gang Mao of Unicore Communications Inc. in China considered multiple frequencies to be a big help in reducing the threat of jamming. Nigel Davies of QinetiQ agreed saying there were a host of technical solutions but key for success would be solutions that use low power, are low cost and feature high usability. He also noted that safety certification of receivers for use in driverless vehicles would be required and this challenging application would need the provision of robust continuous navigation — and sub-metre accuracy.
The future market for GNSS was also discussed in a session that unveiled the GSA’s 4th Issue of its comprehensive GNSS Market Report. With almost four billion GNSS devices used worldwide and all regions experiencing growth, GNSS represents an unprecedented business opportunity. Over the past 15 months the GSA’s team of market monitoring experts has taken a close look at all aspects of the GNSS marketplace with analysis of both hardware and software market opportunities, technology trends and future developments.
Gian-Gherardo Calini, Head of Market Development at GSA, gives highlights of the comprehensive GNSS Global Market report. He will deliver this information in an April 16 webinar hosted by GPS World. Photo: GSA
The top-line results were presented by Gian-Gherardo Calini, Head of Market Development at GSA. GNSS is one of the few growing markets in the world showing 12.7 percent CAGR. It is a very attractive market with volumes and revenues driven by mass market segments: the dominant two being Location-based services and transport applications. This latest edition includes information a new market segment: Timing and Synchronisation. One area that is not included is security and government applications. Mr Calini indicated that this information has been collected by the GSA team but as it is essentially for users of the Public Restricted Service (PRS) it was not included in the open report.
Although the report is very much “Galileo flavored,” its findings are of great importance and value to whole GNSS community and will be the subject of a GPS World webinar with Mr Calini and myself on 16 April. You can register — free — for this informative global perspective now.
A panel discussion followed and covered a range of topics and applications from aviation to agriculture. Again the consensus was that chips would become multi-constellation and quickly. Philippe Prats of STMicroelectronic outlined automotive applications from insurance applications to advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS).
The role of government mandates in establishing markets was seen as positive. The e911 mandate in the states had provided the seed for GPS integration into smartphones. Similarly authentication was also seem as a significant future market driver.
Multi frequency was also showing on industry’s radar and in a couple of years will be a reality thought Philippe Prats with the main motivation being better accuracy. Frank van Diggelen of Broadcom highlighted the recent GPS World feature demonstrating cm accuracy on a smartphone.
Legal Issues
A dedicated session on legal issues was not the best attended part of the conference, which is a shame as it had some serious points to raise and highlighted a gap that is opening up between our technical abilities in GNSS and the legal basis for its use. The Munich Summit is to be commended for its commitment to providing a platform for these issues every year; they are often ignored elsewhere.
Oliver Heinrichs, a partner at BHO Legal in Cologne, emphasised the need to establish a firm regulatory framework and to ensure that any decisions did not cross World Trade Organisation (WTO) provisions and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). In particular the idea of mandating a specific GNSS for applications such as emergency response systems in cars may well be incompatible with WTO rules.
Amedeo Arena of Universitá degli Studi di Napoli Federico II in Naples noted that all GNSS players were members of the WTO and considered that GNSS services and their trade was definitely “caught by the GATTs” so no favouritism for ‘home’ systems should be allowed.
Another area of controversy is automated vehicles. In discussion after the session I learnt that current international conventions governing the use of motorised vehicles require a human supervisory role at all times. There will need to be some fundamental legal groundwork done before the first driverless vehicles will be allowed out on the road for real.
These are legally complex issues and certainty will only come from test cases. Talking of complexity Aleksey Bolkunov of the Russian Federal Space Agency revealed that the legal, regulatory and standardisation measures governing GLONASS and GNSS in Russia consisted of more than 900 documents originating at various different levels of the state. This clearly gave great scope for “regulatory collisions” and he is involved in work to develop a single regulatory framework that should eliminate the remaining barriers to GNSS use in Russia.
Emerging Applications
Peter Grognard of Galileo Services chaired a final session of the day on emerging applications. Bruno Bougard of Septentrio saw dependable accuracy as key to emerging markets. He thought high precision driven by surveying was becoming more and more mainstream. For autonomous driving the challenge was to provide cost-effective, dependable accuracy at 10-30cm that was safe, reliable, and always available. This would require multi GNSS, multiple signals, highly integrated sensors and transparent and open augmentation.
For Neil Gerein of Novatel the mantra is “Accuracy, availability, assurance.” Users needed availability to their PNT solutions at all times. He also saw future applications integrating GNSS with inertial sensors and correction systems for high accuracy without the need for a base station.
or Neil Gerein of Novatel the mantra is “Accuracy, availability, assurance.” Photo: GSA
Lionel Garin of Qualcomm Inc talked about ADAS. Safety was paramount and he foresaw the need for rigorous design and certification procedures similar to that required for the aviation market. Fortunately the industry has lots of expertise here. Philip Mattos of u-blox UK argued that a volume market is in femtocell and small cell synchronisation in mobile networks where GNSS is the lowest cost solution.
Tom Stansell praised geometry as the most important and unique ingredient supplied by multi constellation GNSS. And the second most important ingredient was interoperability. He doubted users would care where their signals originated and devices would still be generically described as ‘GPS’ into the future. Application growth will be stimulated by the better geometry supplied by multi-GNSS constellations. When the E6 signal became available he predicted that 10cm accuracy would enable reliable lane keeping for ADAS.
And Galileo will supply E6 for free said Ignacio Fernandez Hernandez from the European Commission. Ignacio works on the Galileo Commercial Service design and outlined some significant differentiators of the European system including its broad signal for high accuracy and better multipath resilience, more stable clocks and improved ionospheric modelling compared to GPS.
Lionel Garin sounded a note of caution at the end of the session when he noted that multi constellation ability was good, but he was not sure what was actually gained beyond two, or perhaps three, constellations.
GNSS for Weather
The final day of the conference saw a few fragile heads courtesy of the previous evening’s Summit Space Night 2015 sponsored by Airbus Defence & Space, which took place at the Filmcasino am Hofgarten close to the conference venue. And the first session, chaired by Oliver Montenbruck from the DLR, certainly required a clear focus as we were taken through the use of GNSS in space geodesy, space navigation and reflectometry.
Roland Pail from the Technical University, Munich described results from the satellite gravity missions GRACE and GOCE that looked at mass transport processes on our dynamic Earth. A particularly sobering animation showed the extent of ice mass loss from Greenland over the past decade. But what is role of gnss here? The ability to give precise positioning of the satellites and the fact that the satellite orbits carry information on the gravity field.
Atmosphere sounding using GNSS radio occultation allows precise atmospheric profiles with global coverage in all-weathers. Jens Wickert of the Helmholtz Centre Potsdam said that since 2006 these high vertical resolution profiles had been making a significant impact on the world’s weather forecasting including improved hurricane forecasts. It was also a bias free technique for observing global temperature change. With a multi-GNSS future new missions could be planned as more signals would reduce noise. Combining GNSS and reflectometry could enable accurate tsunami detection from space. Similarly Prof Antonio Rius from Barcelona was using reflected GNSS signals to determine data on the surface of the sea such as surface roughness, extent of sea ice and early warning of a tsunami.
Stefan Sassen of Airbus Defence & Space described the LION GNSS navigation receiver for MEO and LEO platforms. The unit was qualified since 2014 and now 50 were on order. LION is highly flexible with multi-frequency, multi-constellation and multi-antennae configurations possible. It was accurate enough for autonomous orbit raising (a few kms) and or station keeping (to within 100cm).
Finally Manfred Sust of RUAG Space GmbH said that space borne gnss receivers were true enabling technologies for Earth Observation missions as precise orbit determination was key to capturing sharper images.
Alternatives
The second session of the day returned to the practical issues around possible alternative or complementary PNT (APNT) systems. As GNSS becomes ubiquitous many terrestrial PNT systems are being decommissioned (LORAN, VOR), but the potential vulnerability of GNSS signals to interference is highlighting the need for backup. The challenge being to balance functionality and cost in the search for “plan ‘B’ for GNSS” as chairman Michael Meurer from DLR described it.
The FAA’s Deborah Lawrence reiterated her plans for scoping and implementing a backup system to cope with a GPS outage in the US. The FAA is currently engaging with stakeholders to define what the minimum operational target for a GPS outage should be to set the basis for procurement activity. The timeline for a final investment decision was now December 2018.
For Europe Gerhard Berz of Eurocontrol thought there were many potential APNT in place and the topic was in the SESAR 2020 research programme. He thought existing DME could potentially do the job in Europe as it had good coverage, but the challenge is to get good geometry and coverage at low altitudes, in remoter areas and over water.
Prof Per Enge of Stanford University “put the moose on the table” and pointed to the 978 and 1030 ranging frequencies as an existing system that could be used for positioning. But how accurate was it? Airborne experiments had shown good agreement with GPS positioning with an accuracy of around 100m and in turns 300m, which was good enough in an emergency. Further tests using a UAV at spider infested Camp Rogers had demonstrated APNT in flight with 50m error. The UAV itself was specifically developed to navigate using APNT while looking for GNSS jammers.
Wouter Pelgrum of Ohio University discussed the relative merits of eLORAN, which has high power – and therefore difficult to jam – and beyond line of site accuracy of less than 10m, and alternatives such as collocation of pseudolites with mobile phone cell towers. This could also enable high accuracy indoors positioning applications. He believed that APNT will need to be context specific and there was no single solution.
Belabbas Boubeker of the DLR discussed modular APNT concepts while Nick Ward of the UK’s General Lighthouse Authorities indicated there was no coordinated policy on resilient PNT in the European maritime sector at present but his authority and others were exploring the possibility of using eLORAN as a commercial enterprise. Nine transmitters were operational in Europe and the service had been declared in 2014.
Michael Hoppe of Fachstelle der WSV für Verkehrstechniken said resilient PNT was a core element of e-navigation for waterways. A combination of techniques such as medium frequency RF, AIS and eLoran could give good accuracy in areas of highest traffic. First results of trials were encouraging.
Processing Power
The final session of the Summit to grab my full attention was chaired by Frank van Diggelen of Broadcom. He led a wide ranging debate on GNSS receiver architecture trends and more generally the future of chip design and fabrication: are we approaching the end of Moore’s law and if so — what next?
Recently “The balance of power has moved back onto the GNSS chip” to enable lower device power use. To highlight current developments Frank described a couple of Broadcom products: the Broadcom 4773 “location hub” that is at the heart of the Samsung Galaxy 6 “super smart phone” and the 4774 that can access signals from all four GNSS constellations and will be shipping in early 2016 on new smartphones.
In fact earlier this year the 4774 was used to make a first fix using signals from four different GNSS constellations (with signals from one each of GPS, GLONASS, Galileo and BEIDOU satellites) and a significant event in terms of our multi-constellation future.
Greg Turetzky of Intel talked about the benefits and challenges for GNSS in advanced silicon processes. He noted that Intel is now shipping 14nm technology and plans were in hand for the next two generations (10nm and 7nm). Moore’s law has been a great enabler for modern society. If automobiles had taken a similar development in the same timeframe we would all be driving cars with a maximum speed of some 300 000 km/hour that cost us around 4 cents to buy!
The big challenge for GNSS architecture was to take advantage of the smaller geometries while greatly reducing standby power. The integration of multiple radio sources to provide a single location solution was key giving ubiquitous location capability that will improve the experience of every mobile product.
Looking into his crystal ball, Peter Anderson of Integrated Navigation Systems in the UK saw that integrating signals from complimentary technologies and sensors would be important but would lead to a greater demand for digital processing. He predicted that multiband receivers would become standard in consumer devices. He also pointed out that the worst potential source of GNSS jamming for a smartphone was the phone itself! The move to dual frequency would be helpful here.
An overview of the Chinese XIHE system for seamless outdoor and indoor location was given by Dongkai Yang of Beihang University. This Beidou Innovative application provides a LBS system based on gnss and mobile communication networks to give a “fusion of communication and positioning for indoor positioning”. The system is being demonstrated in four areas in China in shopping malls. The target for positioning accuracy in the system is for less than 3 metres indoors and less than 1 metre outdoors.
Franz Kreupl of Munich Technical University gave a sobering view of “life after silicon” – essentially it looks like there isn’t one. He outlined the limits to silicon technology such as tunnelling current and predicted some further progress could be made in reducing interconnect sizes and via circuit design. But new candidate materials for semiconductor electronics from carbon nanotubes to widely hailed 2-D materials graphene and MoS2 all suffer major issues that seem to make them non-starters.
But do we need to keep on miniaturizing? Norbert Schuhmann of Fraunhofer IIS in Nuremberg thought that technology downscaling would have an end in terms of the physics, but especially in terms of reasonable cost. He thought 7nm and 2020 was the end point for the physics but that in fact 28nm should be seen as the actual last node in Moore’s law as from then scaling has no longer also been the path for cost reduction. He saw silicon on insulator technology and monolithic 3-D integration as possible paths forward, but the technology sweet spot — and well suited for GNSS — was 55nm and a format that was already extensively used in automotive applications.
This year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona was the biggest ever, with 95,000 attendees and thousands of booths, conferences and people with sore feet walking a cavernous exhibition hall. While the Geneva Auto Show ran close to the same dates, connected vehicle companies and technology were prominently featured. What was interesting, however, was the rise of indoor positioning companies and mobile advertising agencies with interest in location.
BARCELONA — Joining the 95,000 or so Mobile World Congress attendees were about three dozen companies who are offering indoor location and location advertising services. These companies have exhibited at previous conferences, but not in the numbers this year.
At the huge Fira convention center where MWC was held March 2-5, Los Altos, Calif.-based Pole Star installed more than 600 beacons for indoor location. Visitors were able to be guided to booths and other areas through an interactive map. “Business was good in 2014, we sold 10,000 beacons. We are making money,” said Christian Carle, Pole Star CEO.
One analyst said that the big change at MWC wasn’t the number of indoor positioning companies and demos, but the maturity and breadth of the technology. “Intel announced indoor positioning capabilities in their Wi-Fi chip, and had a demo that was very impressive. Many smaller companies that in past years were showing raw technology were showing polished solutions this year, such as Quuppa, MTI and Sensewhere, said Bruce Krulwich, Grizzly Analytics president, who has authored a report identifying 150 indoor positioning companies. “I definitely see a shake-out coming up, but it won’t be one technology prevailing over another. Different technologies meet different needs in the industry, and different technologies fit different sites. There are technologies that deliver universal indoor positioning, without any infrastructure or preparation, such as Wi-Fi multilateration and sensor fusion.”
Krulwich said that there is a shake-out that’s already started because there are too many companies working on similar technologies. “Start-ups in the area that don’t have differentiating innovation, don’t have integration into retail or other back-end systems, and don’t have market penetration, are already finding themselves in a challenge. But companies with clear innovations and commercial deployments will do fine,” he said.
United Kingdom-based Sensewhere is using crowdsourcing in its indoor positioning software. The software uses radios to scan for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to allow an IP location to reference the sources and form a location database.
“It’s what we call the universal indoor positioning versus venue specific indoor positioning, which can work anywhere — we just need a crowd of people. Our target partners are handset manufacturers, network operators, social media, social network providers, and also chipset guys as well,” said Rob Palfreyman, Sensewhere CEO. “So, there are obviously a lot of companies like Google looking at venues; there is Micello and TomTom looking at add-ins in the indoor location, which is great news, but it just needs to have a technology that can drive the blue dot on their map, and we feel that Sensewhere is the right place to provide that blue dot because of the crowdsourcing global nature of our approach.”
One company, which has developed a popular mobile game, is using its network to attract advertisers for its location-based ad platform. “We already have the infrastructure in place because of our mobile game. With our platform, we can allow advertisers to launch campaigns using our beacon signals and geofencing,” said Pedro Jahara, CEO of Brazil-based RevMob.
New location technology like the ability to track SIM cards was rolled out at MWC. W-Locate, which is partnering with Morpho in Thailand, is tracking SIM cards with its XimLoc product, which the company said is more accurate indoors than other technology.
Even such companies as Geotab, which is a strong player in the fleet market, are leveraging MWC to continue a foothold in the European market. The company displayed its IOX-CAN system that can send data from a mobile device to the MyGeotab system, which can be viewed an analyzed by fleet managers, said Maria Sotra, Geotab marketing manager.
Geotab also partnered with Telefonica in November 2014 to focus efforts in Spain, Germany and the United Kingdom, Sotra said.
At MWC, location-based advertising market is gaining traction as advertisers are seeing the benefit of locating and attracting customers. New York-based xAd said it has doubled its revenue for the second year. “We have billions of mobile ads processed and billions of ad impressions. The company is profitable,” said Dipanshu Sharma, xAd founder and CEO.
He said the company has expanded into France and Germany and added China to its global ad network.
Another company that is using location technology as a differentiator is Airpush, which had another big presence at MWC. The company’s Abstract Banners was a big draw to attendees. Location, particularly geofenced areas, have created a call to action for consumers, which is attractive to advertisers, said Cameron Peeples, Airpush vice president of marketing.
Connected Car Still Big Opportunity at MWC
Although the Geneva Auto Show was starting as the MWC was ending, there were still several big announcements by connected car companies in Barcelona. Even the well-publicized Samsung S6 and S6 Edge and HTC One M9 handset rollouts included Mirrorlink, the connected vehicle standard from the Connected Car Consortium.
In another big announcement, Audi and AT&T said that all 2016 model vehicles equipped with Audi connect will come with the carrier’s 4G LTE or 3G coverage. This increase in services is big because the auto giant just rolled out 4G AT&T service in Audi A3s last year.
AT&T selected Airbiquity to provide end-user registration and device management connected vehicle services for select customer programs. “Airbiquity will deliver these services to AT&T using our Choreo cloud-based connected vehicle services delivery platform and project management, engineering, and operations teams,” said David Jumpa, Airbiquity chief revenue officer. “This is a ‘white label’ agreement whereby AT&T will integrate Airbiquity’s service delivery capability into AT&T’s connected vehicle customer solutions.”
Another location company is making huge inroads in connected vehicle markets with its Glympse for Autos product. Glympse will be installed in select Volkswagen and Peugeot models through MirrorLink, said Bryan Trussel, company co-founder and CEO.
The app allows users to share location from their vehicle by setting the recipient and timer, and hitting send. The company has a similar app for Gogo inflight aviation networks to allow a person on the ground to know where an airplane is for picking up passengers.
In other connected car news, Accenture is providing Fiat Chrysler Automobiles the capability of in-car, Internet-based services. Starting with the new Fiat 500X, Uconnect Live services, which was co-developed by Accenture, will power an infotainment system that offers music and news services, social network access, the ability to monitor driving style and a range of diagnostic services.
Accenture also partnered with Visa for an IoT-based connected car commerce test. At MWC, the company tested a scenario where drivers could order food from the car using cellular, Bluetooth and beacon connectivity. Accenture deployed a similar system with BMW’s ConnectedDrive, which allows customers to choose services in real time for a vehicle.
Health Market Even Has Location Potential
Niche location applications are growing as Internet of Things, or IoT, markets start to grow. One company taking advantage of the mobile market is Annapolis, Md.-based TCS, which featured its VirtuMedix platform in its MWC booth.
The platform is tailored to emergency physicians as part of the growing market for video telemedicine products and mobile health, said Jay Whitehurst, TCS commercial software group president. “It’s already saving lives,” he said of the platform, which combines encryption, navigation, mapping and messaging.
While the product, now being rolled out in a North Carolina emergency medicine group, provides patients with an alternative to urgent care centers and emergency rooms, it also can be used for longer term cases such as assisted living and rehab centers, the company said.
Whitehurst said TCS has made several company acquisitions that have played a part in new product rollouts, which include the company’s Trusted Location. The application allows financial firms, online gaming companies and others to identify and prevent credit-card fraud. The application identifies and validates a device’s location worldwide.
In other Mobile World Congress news:
Spirent said its simulators have the capability to evaluate Wi-Fi Offload and Wi-Fi performance of mobile devices on its test framework. The new product allows companies to test multiple devices on a single unit to cover Wi-Fi/LTE mobility and interoperability. The testing is important in light of wireless carriers’ strategy to extend VoLTE in areas where cell coverage is limited, said Saul Einbinder, Spirent vice president, venture development.
Google Waze said its Google Mobile Service (GMS) will be available as a preinstall option on mobile devices. OEMs and carriers can preinstall the app on their handsets so consumers can use the service immediately, the company said.
Trimble’s ALK said its ALK Maps and route visualization software is now available in Europe. ALK Maps, launched in the United States in 2012, allows users to overlay routing, geocoding points, weather and other features, the company said.
