GPS to the power of PNT. Or, as I like to think of it, GPSPNT.
We are rapidly entering — or we have already entered — the era in which we say “GPS” but we really mean so much more.
We mean GNSS: GPS + GLONASS + Galileo + BeiDou.
We mean all of the above plus satellite-based augmentation systems (SBAS), now encompassing WAAS, EGNOS, SDCM, QZSS, IRNSS, and I don’t think we’re done yet.
We mean all the above plus several private-sector corrections services, including but not limited to OmniStar, StarFire, Veripos, Fugro, Terrastar, Atlas, and surely more to come.
We mean all of the above plus back-ups in the event of jamming or other interference: eLoran is a prime candidate, and there are others.
We mean all of the above plus many technologies that can be integrated — are being integrated — with GPS/GNSS to achieve a seamless position, navigation and timing (PNT) solution: inertial and other MEMS, cell ID, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, DSRC, FM and UHF, and many more. Think of a band of the RF spectrum (or even non-RF technology as the mentioned inertial/MEMS); it’s probably on that list or soon will be.
We mean all of the above plus many forms of software that go into making up a geographic information systems (GIS) backbone, a map-matching system, a building information model (BIM) or other application and extension of the GPS data.
They all work together. They all need each other. But they all begin with GPS. Sometime tomorrow, they will all begin with GNSS. Today, GPS is the game in town.
Saying “we mean,” I denote “we” in the loose or editorial sense: this magazine. We treat all of the technologies as ways to get to the solution: the ubiquitous, seamless PNT solution. We’ve been wondering recently if the umbrella has grown too wide for “GPS” to continue to be its label.
No matter how professionally and technically correct both you and we aim to be by employing the terms GNSS, PNT and integrated positioning technologies as appropriate, the world at large probably will continue to call all of the above “GPS.” And the label remains the easiest shorthand for all of the above. That is one of the reasons we have decided to continue calling this great magazine GPS World.
But we really mean so much more, and the pages that follow this one, and will follow in months to come, bring you so much more — fulfilling the promise of the “kicker” in our new name: GNSS, Position, Navigation, and Timing.
The X-47B unmanned combat aircraft receives fuel from an Omega K-707 tanker on April 22 while operating in the Atlantic Test Ranges over the Chesapeake Bay. This test marked the first time an unmanned aircraft refueled in flight. The X-47B is a tailless, jet-powered, blended-wing-body aircraft capable of semi-autonomous operation and aerial refueling.
STOIC Technology to Augment or Substitute for GPS
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) selected Rockwell Collins to develop technologies that could serve as a backup to GPS. The research, being conducted as part of DARPA’s Spatial, Temporal and Orientation Information in Contested Environments (STOIC) program, aims to reduce warfighter dependence on GPS for modern military operations.
Rockwell Collins will develop new architectures and techniques to enable communication systems that will support time transfer and positioning between moving platforms independent of GPS, with no impact on primary communications functionality.
“STOIC technology could augment GPS, or it may act as a substitute for GPS in contested environments where GPS is degraded or denied,” said John Borghese, vice president of the Rockwell Collins Advanced Technology Center. “The time-transfer and ranging capabilities we are developing seek to enable distributed platforms to cooperatively locate targets, employ jamming in a surgical fashion, and serve as a backup to GPS for relative navigation.”
Borghese added that the goal of the STOIC program is to develop positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) systems that provide GPS-independent PNT, achieving timing that surpasses GPS levels of performance. The program is comprised of three primary elements that, when integrated, have the potential to provide global PNT independent of GPS, including long-range robust reference signals, ultra-stable tactical clocks, and multifunctional systems that provide PNT information among cooperative users in contested environments.
For this third technical element, Rockwell Collins is tasked with developing multifunction communication system solutions that yield DARPA STOIC objective picosecond-accurate time transfer and enable GPS levels of relative positioning accuracy in contested environments.
“Future applications of STOIC technology could include a variety of precision relative navigation operations, such as autonomous aerial refueling and cooperative navigation and collision avoidance within unmanned aerial vehicle swarms,” Borghese said. “It also could support precise time transfer for networking operations in contested environments.”
ELORAN
Wildwood eLoran Tests Continue
The Wildwood, N.J.,eLoran 100-kHz transmitter continuously broadcast a signal from 0900 (EDT) on Oct. 20 through 1800 on Oct. 22, with plans to transmit further eLoran test signals from 0900 (EST) on Nov. 3 until 1200 on Nov. 6, and again from 0900 on Nov. 9 until1500 on Nov. 13.
The purpose of these tests is to gather data on differential Loran performance in the Boston Metro and D.C. Metro areas. “Besides fixed eLoran receivers at our N. Billerica, Mass., and Leesburg, Va., offices, we also have additional fixed eLoran receivers located at the USNO and at the Harris Corporation offices in Herndon, Va.,” stated UrsaNav. The company also plans to gather temporal and spatial decorrelation data in both Metro areas. Note that these signals are for test purposes only and should not be used for any other purpose.
In May, Exelis, UrsaNav, the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate (DHS S&T) and the U.S. Coast Guard entered into a cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) for testing and demonstration at former Loran-C sites, including Wildwood. The team will evaluate eLoran as a potential complementary system to GPS.
The sites are the legacy ground-based radio navigation infrastructure of the decommissioned Loran-C service that could be retained and upgraded to provide eLoran low-frequency service.The broadcasts will provide a usable signal at a range up to 1,000 miles.
INERTIAL
MEMS Perspective on SatNav Gathering
By Alissa M. Fitzgerald
In September, I attended the Institute of Navigation GNSS+ 2015 conference, where I chaired a technical session on commercial
micro-electro-mechanical sensors (MEMS). As the founder of a MEMS product development firm, I was eager to gain perspective from the world’s largest technical meeting and showcase of satnav technology, products and services.
Overall, the navigation community is enthusiastic about integrating MEMS into navigation systems. They like the idea of getting more data from small, relatively low-cost sensors. Recently, U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter declared his wish that we move to MEMS-based position, navigation and timing (PNT) information.
What navigators want from MEMS depends on who they are.
The “high integrity” navigators — the people whose systems land airplanes or steer self-driving cars — would like MEMS sensors with enough performance to enable accurate inertial navigation without GPS for at least 10 minutes. If a GPS receiver can’t see at least four satellites in the sky, it can’t produce accurate navigation data. High integrity navigators are the original developers of sensor fusion systems; they know that no one sensor is perfect, so they design systems to detect loss of a reliable signal, and then adeptly switch between sensor data streams as needed to maintain accurate navigation information. Ten minutes of GPS-independent inertial navigation buys you enough time to get to higher altitudes, out of a tunnel or around a skyscraper, to a position that improves your view of the sky.
The “consumer” navigators — the people who want you to help them find the nearest Starbucks in downtown San Francisco — would like better low-cost MEMS gyroscopes and magnetometers, specifically with improved stability, to improve pedestrian inertial navigation. Although pedestrians are relatively slow-moving compared to vehicles, a key challenge to their accurate navigation is maintaining inertial position fixes while their smartphones unexpectedly change orientation: waving about in a person’s hand or sliding around in a purse or pants pocket.
It’s clear we MEMS people need to spend more time with these end-users, to first understand how MEMS will integrate with their other sensors and GNSS, and then to derive the essential MEMS sensor specifications for each specific navigation system and use case. The quest for seamless navigation has been and will continue to be an exercise in sensor fusion.
Alissa Fitzgerald is managing member, A.M. Fitzgerald & Associates, a MEMS consulting firm serving diverse industries.
Q:Where do you see your efforts and thoseof your organization focusing primarily over the next 5–10 years?
Vidal Ashkenazi CEO, Nottingham Scientific Ltd.
A: GPS, and GNSS generally, will continue to be a big part of our work and remain at the core of our activities. We are not tied to a single technology, though. We are driven more by applications — and so we do not rule out the use of other sensors. As GNSS becomes more widely used and people expect more from it, we will make greater use of additional sensors to fulfil application requirements in more demanding environments.
A: GPS was the catalyst for a revolution in the application of precise position and time (that is, “Positime”).But it’s now 20 years old, and the developed world has become dependent on access to Positime, still mostly from GPS but with many likely complements/backups going forward. It is time to get serious and construct a layered PNT architecture to bolster GPS with regional and local/autonomous PNT sources for resiliency and precision.
Terence McGurn Consultant, U.S. Government
A: That we need alternatives to GNSS is now a given. But I see little discussion of the strategy for deploying those alternatives. Currently, we seem to emphasize detection and mitigation of the cause of a GNSS outage. To use a medical analogy, the cause of the patient’s accident is a “nice to know”, but the real issue is to keep the patient/service alive. So I’d like to see more focus on how — and how quickly — we activate the alternatives.
That is, in the People’s Republic of Boulder, Colorado. To those of us who live in Colorado, Boulder is known by this seemingly timeless but absolutely accurate appellation. This stunningly beautiful city located in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, known as the Flatirons, is where the National Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing Advisory Board (PNTAB), which provides independent advice to the National Executive Committee on Space-Based PNT (EXCOM) from outside the U.S. government, chose to meet in the waning days of October 2015. Ironically, they chose the same week as a Republican presidential candidates debate, which took place at the University of Colorado just a couple of miles away. The PNTAB was also concomitant with the ICG, the Tenth Meeting of the International Committee on GNSS (ICG-10), held Nov. 2-5, 2015. Both the PNTAB and ICG were held at the Boulder NCAR/UCAR facility, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research Center Green Conference facility.
PNTAB
The PNTAB serves a vital purpose. Board memberse advise the highest levels of the U.S. government (USG) concerning all matters relating to PNT. This open-ended charter covers a multitude of sins, and as the new PNTAB Chairman John Stenbit, stated clearly, it is important to focus on the doable, even if it seems difficult, but not to tilt at windmills. I have known and worked with John Stenbit for more than 25 years, especially during his two stints in the Pentagon, and I find him to be extremely knowledgeable and ethical. He is certainly well-spoken and gregarious, but he does not suffer fools, and is known to be resolute, which is a pseudonym for stubborn and hardheaded, but in a good way. I look forward to his chairmanship.
PNTAB Members at 16th Meeting in Boulder. New Chairman John Stenbit is center of last row. (Courtesy of gps.gov)
You can view the PNTAB presentations at the www.gps.gov website. While there, you will note there were more than 25 presentations, and most were excellent. Only a couple required the audience to consume copious amounts of caffeine to remain coherent.
In the end, the PNTAB adopted courses of action (COA) on which to formulate recommendations for the EXCOM. For our purposes, the pertinent COAs centered around two main subject areas: Spectrum protection and eLoran. The spectrum protection issues are fraught with equal parts litigious danger and tedium. Not coincidently, the World Radiocommunication Conference 2015 (WRC-15) kicked off in Geneva, Switzerland, on Nov. 2, just two days after the end of the PNTAB. Several of the PNTAB members attended the closing Saturday night PNTAB dinner and flew from Denver direct to Geneva Sunday morning, just in time for some minor jet lag adjustments, and then attended the opening ceremonies of WRC 2015 in snowy Switzerland.
I have had the dubious privilege of observing several International Telecommunication Union (ITU)-sponsored WRC sessions in the past, and it is certainly a critical spectrum decision-making body. (Seriously, folks, 26 days of talking and wrangling about spectrum? Praise the Lord the Swiss know how to brew strong coffee.) WRC 2015 wraps up on Nov. 27. In this regard, Ann Ciganer, who serves as an official PNTAB representative and the executive director of policy for the GPS Innovation Alliance (GPSIA, formerly the U.S. GPS Industry Council), is my hero. She has been working spectrum issues for more than 20 years. She has the fortitude of FDR and the patience of Job.
Since the spectrum and spectrum-protection issues are still being coldly debated in Geneva, let’s take a look at the PNTAB’s second major topic, eLoran. While eLoran was discussed ad nauseam, there was one definitive standout presentation given by my old friend and colleague Professor David Last. David is Professor Emeritus at the University of Wales (Bangor) and former president of the Royal Institute of Navigation (RIN). As he is wont to do, David held forth, with that wonderful, attention-arresting British public school accent, on eLoran matters before an appreciative audience. David presented his topic with equal parts passion and credibility. You can view his presentation material in its entirety (the PowerPoint slides, anyway) at www.gps.gov, but you will not have the wonderful experience of having him present it personally with all the attendant persuasion, and dry British humor and wit.
eLoran European Style
David immediately makes the point early on in the historical portion of his presentation that the U.S. first committed to Loran-C more than 75 years ago, and as recently as 2010 upgraded a majority of the sites to eLoran status only to have the current administration shut down Loran just after officially assuring the United Kingdom the U.S. would keep Loran up and running. Now the U.S. is in the position of looking for a backup and major terrestrial augmentation to GPS (GNSS) and is once again considering eLoran.
Professor David Last at 16th PNTAB
Professor David Last at the 16th PNTAB meeting. (Photo: Don Jewell)
Professor Last explained the difference between our viewpoints. “I see it from a British perspective, and a European perspective. I watch administrations in other parts of the world grappling with the same decisions the U.S. faces. The U.S., of course, is in a unique position: it is the source of GPS, the world standard in satellite navigation. And over the nearly 40 years since the first satellite was launched, the U.S. has taken the lead in learning to understand the role of GPS, from its military-only origins, through when it was a novelty with its first civil applications, through a period of hubris in which it was to replace every other means of navigation on land, sea and air, to its present role, so deeply embedded in your national life as to form a critical component of national infrastructure. The U.S. was first to recognize the vulnerabilities of GPS, to understand the threat they posed to your nation and to seek ways of mitigating them. That topic came to dominate technical conferences first in the U.S. and now around the world. And it has led to a policy debate of quite exceptional difficulty, one that is shared by all governments.”
The Message
What David did not come right out and say, although I maintain it was implied by his tone of voice and body language, is that this discussion is at times both energized and denigrated by those that refuse to acknowledge GPS or GNSS vulnerabilities and those that would be happy to see it revert to a military-only system — the proverbial ostrich syndrome. David made it clear that GPS vulnerability discussions must take place publicly in the U.S. because they are, in fact, global discussions. “All space-based PNT systems today are similar to GPS in concept and technology, and referred to by most users as GPS,” he said. “Very few bother or even know about Galileo, GLONASS and BeiDou. To them, it is all simply GPS.”
David went on to make his point by describing the ubiquity and pervasiveness of GPS and GNSS. “Now there is no area of transportation, commerce, industry or telecommunications in your country or mine that does not employ satellite navigation.”
Indeed, David described how other GNSS systems came about due to national pride, and yet they had no choice but to mimic GPS both technically and officially, since they must for safety-of-life concerns reside in the same regimes and crowded radio bands.
David stated, “Soon, these new GNSS became invested with immense national pride. Their vast cost had to be justified by claims of technical superiority. In reality, engineers know that their designers had no choice but to make them compatible with GPS, since GPS was decades ahead and the world standard. These new systems also had to squeeze alongside GPS in the narrow radio bands allocated internationally to navigation. Not surprisingly, indeed happily, all our new GNSS turned out to look very like GPS: versions of the same technology — with just a hint of garlic here, a whiff of curry there. This similarity is obvious to engineers and to navigators, though rarely to politicians.”
DOT Volpe GPS Jamming Report
Professor Last referred to the U.S. provider and user communities as groups that, prior to the important 2001 Volpe Report, failed to acknowledge that GPS had any serious vulnerabilities. That report was a watershed event for the future of GPS, and for me as a journalist. Among other jamming incidents around the country, a major jamming occurrence in San Diego harbor affected GPS-dependent systems (mostly those dependent on accurate timing) and users for miles around. It became a wakeup call for GPS and GNSS users globally; I wrote a Defense PNT column on it in this space in 2007.
David put it in perspective. “To understand the perceptions of those governments, wind back the U.S. story to before the Volpe Report on GPS vulnerability with its recommendations that led to your [PNT Advisory] Board’s policy of ‘Protect, Toughen, and Augment’. Despite the growth of jamming and even attacks by one sovereign nation on its neighbor, despite the appearance of low-cost spoofing, there has never been a Volpe Report anywhere outside the United States. The pre-Volpe culture of the denial of vulnerability is alive and well and living in Europe.”
“Thirty-seven years after the launch of the first GPS satellite, there is still little recognition by the world’s governments of how essential resilient position, navigation and timing have become to the critical infrastructure of their nations,” Last said.
After the Volpe Report came an industry report chaired by the Father of GPS, Professor Bradford Parkinson (Col, USAF, Ret), describing eLoran as the only cost-effective method of backup to GPS. The report was published globally, and then the United States completely failed to implement the transition from Loran-C to eLoran. At the time it failed politically, the Loran-C to eLoran conversion was 85 percent complete and only needed a small amount of funding for the future. Luddites within the U.S. OMB (Office of Management and Budget) managed to kill the program just short of completion. Unfortunately, the message to the world of GPS users was the U.S. had categorically rejected eLoran as a complimentary PNT system.
David presented the European point of view: “The Volpe Report, an FAA study, proposed and demonstrated Enhanced Loran (eLoran). GPS-like digital techniques were applied to the obsolete Loran-C low-frequency system. The result were astounding: it met the accuracy, integrity, availability and continuity standards of certain aircraft instrument approaches plus the very demanding port-entrance requirements of shipping, and it delivered precise timing to support telecomms. Brad Parkinson’s high-level study group of industry leaders said this was the only cost-effective GPS substitute for U.S. needs.
“The world outside the U.S. watched the Department of Homeland Security announce eLoran as the U.S. national backup to GPS and then completely fail to implement it! That message, that the U.S. does not need a complementary system and has rejected eLoran, is the current understanding of U.S. policy in many countries.”
Professor Last maintains the same eLoran drama is now being played out in Europe in real time. The UK developed its own eLoran system from the North of Norway to the South of France which, while it only officially achieved initial operational capability on Oct 31, 2014, has in fact been running flawlessly 24/7 for three years.
The message to the world, especially Europe, should be that the eLoran concept proposed by the U.S. FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) really works and is easy to implement. It has been, in fact, implemented and maintained in the UK by a mere handful of personnel.
However, according to David, the European eLoran system may never reach FOC (full operational capability) because currently Western Europe lacks any coordinated plan to respond to the vulnerabilities of GPS and all other PNT systems. Many have yet to embrace or even recognize the Volpe Report.
Indeed, several European countries are planning to shut down their eLoran systems supposedly since that is what we (the U.S.) did and it seems to be working for us.
David explains that “this [proven] system may never reach Full Operational Capability. Western Europe lacks any coordinated plan to respond to the vulnerability of GPS — why, who needs that when Europe has Galileo and EGNOS! The governments who control the Loran stations in Norway and France, observing that mariners no longer want Loran-C, plan to close down the transmissions just nine weeks from now, and demolish the infrastructure. After all, they say, that is what the U.S. did.”
Service Alternative
To paraphrase Winston Churchill, this was indeed not our finest hour. However David maintains there is a realistic commercial alternative: provide eLoran as a service. This is exactly what some in the United Kingdom and Europe are considering. It is a totally viable alternative, but David asserts that what would really help “is a positive signal from the United States.”
Continuing in the same vein, David posits “all is not lost. Responding to the future — indeed, the present — needs of the telecomms and broadcasting industries, and driven from the U.S., there is a commercial plan to take over and operate that European Loran infrastructure and sell its services to government and industrial users. If governments struggle to seize the initiative in this area, let the market — and good old greed — provide the mechanism for realizing the multiple benefits, paying the costs and making a profit. But I believe that this initiative will only succeed in Europe, if there is a positive signal from the U.S. The world listens to signals from the U.S., from the EXCOM, from this board.”
Unique Organizations
Historically, relationships between multi-GNSS systems are confrontational at best; however, David states clearly that Europeans realize the PNTAB and EXCOM are unique and unprecedented around the world. “These official government entities recognize and advocate for resilient PNT that is of major importance to critical infrastructures of the U.S. and other nations as well.”
In actuality, the U.S. has faced up to these vulnerabilities thanks to the PNTAB and EXCOM, two truly unique organizations. Undeniably, there is an incalculable polyphonic argument to be made concerning the vulnerabilities of space-based PNT systems such as GPS and how to mitigate them, but globally beyond the PNTAB and EXCOM, no one is officially having these critical discussions.
In the end, according to Professor Last, over the next nine weeks the immediate future of PNT really comes down to one critical question: “Will global PNT with eLoran be a global system or a nationally unique system?”
David supports his cogent argument for eLoran by giving excellent examples of GPS and multi-GNSS jamming supporting his insightful adage, “Space-based PNT systems live and die together.” They are all subject to the same vulnerabilities.
Wrapping up his refreshingly insightful presentation, Professor Last posed two questions to the PNTAB:
Does the U.S. see a role for eLoran as a complement to resilient GPS?
Does the U.S. recognize and encourage the move to GNSS receivers that take advantage of multiple constellations?
As one PNTAB pundit opined, “The critical issue for the U.S. government is we have to break the mold. The current administration is too often technologically controlled by Luddites and held hostage by low-level bureaucrats within OMB.”
Professor Last appropriately has the last word: “The bottom line for the PNTAB, EXCOM and USG is that the United Kingdom, nee Europe, is asking for support on eLoran.”
Until next time, happy navigating and don’t forget your GPS when you head over the bridge and through the woods to Grandma’s house. Happy Thanksgiving!
Rockwell Collins has been selected by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop technologies that could serve as a backup to GPS. The research, being conducted as part of DARPA’s Spatial, Temporal and Orientation Information in Contested Environments (STOIC) program, aims to reduce warfighter dependence on GPS for modern military operations.
Under the terms of the agreement, Rockwell Collins will develop innovative architectures and techniques to enable communication systems that will support time transfer and positioning between moving platforms independent of GPS, with no impact on primary communications functionality.
“STOIC technology could augment GPS, or it may act as a substitute for GPS in contested environments where GPS is degraded or denied,” said John Borghese, vice president of the Rockwell Collins Advanced Technology Center. “The time-transfer and ranging capabilities we are developing seek to enable distributed platforms to cooperatively locate targets, employ jamming in a surgical fashion, and serve as a backup to GPS for relative navigation.”
Borghese added that the goal of the STOIC program is to develop positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) systems that provide GPS-independent PNT, achieving timing that far surpasses GPS levels of performance. The program is comprised of three primary elements that, when integrated, have the potential to provide global PNT independent of GPS, including long-range robust reference signals, ultra-stable tactical clocks, and multifunctional systems that provide PNT information between cooperative users in contested environments.
For this third technical element, Rockwell Collins is tasked with developing multifunction communication system solutions that yield DARPA STOIC objective picosecond-accurate time transfer and enable GPS-levels of relative positioning accuracy in contested environments.
“Future applications of STOIC technology could include a variety of precision relative navigation operations, such as autonomous aerial refueling and cooperative navigation and collision avoidance within unmanned aerial vehicle swarms,” said Borghese. “It also could support precise time transfer for networking operations in contested environments.”
Here it comes right at ya, down the cable into your living room, over the radio waves into the coffee shop or airport and your car: the Internet of Everything (IOE).
The term connotes adding connectivity and intelligence to just about every tech device in use at home, office, or out on the street, to enable special functions, reporting, and command/control. From kitchen appliances to cars, it’s anything with “smart” in front of its name, tied to the Internet and interconnected to tech-ecosystems of software, services, data warehouses, and yet other smart devices, starting but certainly not ending with your phone, watch, tablet or PC.
Most semiconductor companies have fielded new processors aimed at IOE. Broadcom’s new chip, reported in this issue, folds GNSS into the digital cake mix. Market research predicts 220 billion connected devices in use by 2020, and market size in the trillions. Trillions.
The bandwidth to run this new ecosystem is truly staggering. Available spectrum just won’t do it, not in the way we’re using it. Far more precise timing of data packets shot through the cloud will be necessary.
Thus our cover story. GNSS — well, GPS so far — is tightly woven into the fabric of financial and security infrastructure because it furnishes micro- and nanosecond synchronization. Nanos ain’t where it’s at in another eyeblink more. Picoseconds will be the new standard.
GNSS as currently constituted cannot do picoseconds. Another technology or technologies will be required.
This is true on nearly every front, every sector in which GNSS has enabled so much that previously was inconceivable or just plain unconceived. We’re headed further in all those directions, and GNSS can’t get us there alone. Aided and abetted by other positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) technologies, it can.
The magazine has long covered other PNT technologies, but starting in November you’ll see a whole lot more of this. Every PNT technology, in every issue, in some way. That’s my IOU. Because, after all, it’s a World of Everything.
Pink for a Cure
Our cover logo this month signals that North Coast Media (NCM) is doing something to helpmake a difference. Because October is our company’s largest revenue month each year, our leadership team hascommitted to donate a portion of the company’s October revenues to cancer research. In 2014, NCM donated $8,000to this very worthy cause. The disease has touched the lives of nearly everyone on the NCM team; we’re very excited to be able todo something that matters.
Spirent Communications has announced a Robust PNT Test Framework that evaluates GPS and GNSS security vulnerabilities for positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) systems.
Threats to GNSS and related PNT applications are more orchestrated and coordinated, with the motivation to disrupt or cause financial loss. The technology to disrupt GPS has also become much more accessible, resulting in GPS vulnerability gaining attention at hacker conventions.
Spirent’s GSS100D Detector, developed in collaboration with Nottingham Scientific Ltd, enables detection, characterization and analysis of real GNSS threats.
The Robust PNT Test Framework will be used by technology, system and application developers where PNT is critical. Spirent’s framework enables threats to be detected in the field, taken into the lab and re-synthesized along with GPS and other GNSS signals. In addition, Spirent’s threat intelligence library of actual and typical threats provides a wide range of GNSS segment errors and spoofing attacks, as well as space weather and other vulnerabilities for preventive troubleshooting.
“Spirent wants to move beyond talking about the increase of GNSS vulnerabilities and offer a pragmatic approach to enable informed decision making when it comes to evaluating the impact of vulnerabilities,” said John Pottle, marketing director of Spirent’s Positioning Technology Division. “Through our Robust PNT Test Framework Spirent is pulling everything together to enable users to readily audit systems and take practical steps to improve resilience.”
The Ecole Nationale de l’Aviation Civile (ENAC) and the French Space Agency’s “Satellite Positioning and Timing” Technical Skills Community (CNES CCT PDS) will hold the second edition of the International Technical Symposium on Navigation and Timing on Nov. 16-17, 2015, at the ENAC premises in Toulouse, France.
The event is based on the following key elements:
Technical presentations on hot topics related to navigation and timing.
All presentations given by invited international guest speakers recognized worldwide for their expertise.
Round tables to facilitate discussions between the audience and the guest speakers.
Registration to this symposium is free of charge. The number of seats is limited, so register as early as possible.
Program
This year, the symposium is composed of three sessions: “Positioning in Challenging Environments” , “GNSS Signals and System Design” and “Air Navigation.”
Invited guest speakers are:
Martin Haueis – Head of Localisation and Data Management, Daimler AG, Germany
Christopher J. Hegarty – Director for CNS Engineering and Spectrum, MITRE Corporation, USA
Mikael Mabilleau – Navigation Services Manager, Egis Avia, France
Mitch Narins (Invited) – Chief Systems Engineer for Navigation Programs, Federal Aviation Authority, USA
Oscar Pozzobon – Founder and Technical Director, Qascom, Italy
Mark L. Psiaki – Professor, Cornell University, USA
John F. Raquet – Director of the Autonomy and Navigation Technology (ANT) Center, US Air Force Institute of Technology, USA
Lionel Ries – Head of the Navigation/Location Signals Dept, CNES, France
Francis Soualle – Navigation System Engineer, Airbus Defence and Space, Germany
Morton Stakkeland – Development Engineer, Indra Navia, Norway
A. J. Van Dierendonck – AJ Systems, USA
Lauri Wirola – System Architect, HERE, Finland
Zheng Yao – Ass. Professor, Tsinghua University, China
NSL is one of the companies in Europe involved in satellite navigation, specializing in developing reliable and robust GNSS technologies for a variety of applications, such as those that impact safety or are critical in terms of business, finance and security. NSL has carried out many successful GNSS research programs within the UK and internationally for government organizations, regulators and policy makers, Spirent said.
Martin Foulger (left), general manager at Spirent Communications, meets with Mark Dumville, general Manager of NSL, at NSL’s headquarters in Nottingham, UK. (Photo: Spirent)
The combination of NSL’s acknowledged expertise in the research of GNSS vulnerabilities with Spirent’s leadership in GNSS simulation and test development enables the provision of a range of planned robust positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) solutions.
“Threats to GNSS and related PNT applications are becoming more orchestrated and coordinated, with the motivation to disrupt or cause financial loss becoming the driving factor,” said John Pottle, marketing director at Spirent’s Positioning division. “Real-world threats are wide-ranging and affect navigation and timing system performance differently. Our partnership with NSL enables not only detection, but also regeneration, of real threats in the lab. This allows users to understand which threats are most relevant to them, and informs decisions on improving robustness.”
“NSL and Spirent share a vision that building robust position, navigation and timing systems is enabled through evaluating system performance against a real threats baseline” Mark Dumville, general manager at Nottingham Scientific Ltd, said. “By auditing system performance, decisions on how to improve resilience can be based on facts, not guesswork.”
How accurate is good enough for the majority of your market sector? This chart show the answers from those who identified themselves as members of the survey and high-precision community. For more results from this and other sectors, see the 2015 State of the GNSS Industry Report.
Memory fails as to who first said “Accuracy is addictive.” Or perhaps it’s my knowledge base that is deficient. At any rate, I’ll gladly publish documented evidence from anyone who can show the earliest — print or audio — expression of that dictum. It continues to hold as true for this industry as Moore’s Law does for computer technology as a whole.
We have seen the gradual tightening of accuracy requirements across all sectors of the positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) community with each successive iteration of our State of the GNSS Industry Survey, now in its fourth year. This is the first time we have seen it cross the 1-centimeter line. Not in capability; sub-centimeter capability has been available for some time. But now that level of performance is the minimum acceptable “good enough” for more respondents in the survey and high-precision sector than any lesser degree of accuracy; in fact, greater than all other ranges combined. These addicts form the new majority. Their preferences and their behaviors will rule our world.
Other sectors will presumably answer likewise in coming years, following the trail blazed by the high-precision pioneers.
We have crossed the Rubicon. Unlike other obsessive behaviors, there is no going back in our case. This path is a one-way road to — well, not to the various hells entailed by other addictions — but to the promised land of always-on, always-true, near-perfect provision of positioning.
Let’s not kid ourselves, however. The perfect world does not exist. The closer we get to millimetric accuracy, the more obstacles we find in our way. Indoor continuity aka ubiquity, jamming, spoofing, hacking, budget cutbacks, slides to the right — this list will surely grow.
The more acute our addiction, the lower our tolerance for less-than-total fulfillment.
Table 1. Preliminary 2013 U.S. GPS economic benefit estimates. (Chart: GPS World, based on data from author)
This article is based on a presentation to the National Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing Advisory Board in June 2015. The study reported on at the meeting was requested by the National Executive Committee for Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing. It demonstrates the widespread use and importance of GPS to the U.S., with estimated benefits in 2013 of about $56 billion, or 0.3% of GDP for a subset of applications. The study is the first part of an effort that is expected to refine and extend this analysis.
By Irv Leveson
Critical to many civilian applications and innovations, GPS brings great economic benefits. These benefits have grown rapidly with the integration of GPS with other technologies and its wider and deeper infusion into applications. New GPS signals and other improvements in the system will further expand and enhance use. The unmistakable conclusion: GPS is everywhere.
Benefits of GPS to the U.S. will increase with the availability of other GNSS systems, even though GPS will constitute a smaller share of global GNSS benefits. The U.S. will continue to provide leadership, standards and innovation in technology and applications with positive domestic feedback.
GPS and other GNSS and enhancements raise productivity; reduce and avoid costs; save time; enable improved and new production processes, products and markets; increase health and well-being; reduce injury and loss of life; improve the environment; and increase security.
The National Executive Committee for Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT), which is responsible for maintaining U.S. leadership in GNSS, commissioned a study to assign a quantitative value to the broad economic uses of GPS. The purpose is to inform the public, federal decision makers and critical infrastructure owners/operators on the importance of GPS and the need to protect it from disruption. Assessing the economic implications of actions such as preventing or disallowing interference, spectrum reallocation, developing supplementary or backup systems and/or toughening receivers can be informed by value estimates and the data used to derive them. In addition, economic values can contribute to planning for GPS modernization and analysis of budgets. Baseline estimates facilitate comparisons with future developments. GPS benefit estimates will be “ballpark” no matter how sophisticated the methodology because of limits to the availability of information, but in many cases, knowing orders of magnitude is essential in choosing courses of action.
Widespread, Pervasive Impact. The technological environment is one of rapid changes in information and materials technology and integration of technologies at levels ranging from systems on a chip to large-scale systems. GPS is increasingly integrated with other technologies and systems that build on each other to achieve greater outcomes.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security counts GPS as an enabling technology because of its crucial role in 14 of the 16 industries that are classified as part of the nation’s critical infrastructure. It is useful to view GPS’ role as being especially important in “enabling the enablers,” industries that particularly support the rest of the economy and are at the forefront of economic growth. The most notable of these are transportation, communications, power and financial services.
Economic Value versus Impact
Economic value is the addition to the value of the economy from the provision of a good or service, or the introduction of a technology. Benefits are measured relative to what would have been expected if there were no GPS. Direct economic value is the increase in value in using sectors. Total economic value includes increases in value to suppliers and value induced in the rest of the economy.
Direct economic impact, on the other hand, refers to measures of the importance of sectors that are using GPS. Total economic impact is the importance of sectors affected by GPS, whether they are using it or not. Total economic impact of GPS is virtually the size of the whole economy, so it is not very meaningful.
Direct economic impact is measured by value added of using sectors when the purpose is to avoid duplication among sectors that buy from and sell to each other. It may be measured by revenue for a single sector when adding sectors is not involved, so there is no need to avoid duplication.
The distinction between economic value and economic impact is critical. Even if economic impact is measured by value added rather than revenue, the value is not the net addition to the economy from the use of the product or technology. It is only the size of the using sector. See Figure 1.
Figure 1. Measuring GPS economic value and economic impact. (Chart: author)
The GSA Study
The most comprehensive estimates of global GNSS market size come from the European GNSS Agency (GSA), which has released four market reports from 2010 through 2015. The data are measures of economic impact and not economic value. The reports are of great interest because of their comprehensive global look at the sizes of markets and inclusion of forecasts. In contrast, the emphasis in this part of the present study is on current economic value, with U.S. benefits assessed for GPS.
One reason for interest in the GSA reports is that market information and projections often are proprietary and there can be great inconsistency across market research studies. GSA makes use of many confidential studies without revealing which sources contributed to each estimate. It apparently has been allowed to incorporate proprietary information from a number of market research firms since the data is subsumed in GSA’s own estimates and/or presented in graphs for which underlying numbers are not provided — and from which it is often difficult to even roughly extract them.
The 2015 report stated the methodology as: “The underlying forecasting model uses advanced forecasting techniques applied to a wide range of input data, assumptions and scenarios…Where possible, historical values are anchored to actual data.” Results were checked against opinions of market segment experts and market research reports. However, these analyses are not provided in the reports and have not been made available.
A distinction is made between the core market which covers the value of components that provide GNSS functionality in devices and enabled markets which “represent the services and devices enabled by GNSS.” The 2015 report provides global data on both core and enabled market and goes into much more detail on core markets for application sectors. In addition to providing sector information that did not appear previously, the 2015 report presents data on the extent to which each combination of the GNSS constellations was supported by receivers or chipsets offered by suppliers. Additional information on enabled sectors is in earlier reports.
GSA found in its 2015 market report that:
3.6 billion GNSS devices were in use globally in 2014, of which 3.08 billion were smartphones and .26 billion were for road.
North America had about 450 million devices installed (about 80% U.S.).
North America had 1.4 devices per capita in 2014.
North American shipments were 250–300 million in 2013.
Global core revenue was estimated at roughly €62 billion and enabled revenue at €227 billion in 2014. As noted, core revenue includes GNSS device components, software and services, while enabled revenue refers to applications.
Location-based services (LBS) was projected to account for 53.2% of 2013–2023 core revenue growth, and road for 38%.
North American-based companies had sizeable shares of the global GNSS core market in 2012, particularly among component manufacturers. (See Table 2). Their market share among system integrators was highest in aviation.
North American-based companies had a 44% market share of value-added services revenue in 2012.
Table 2. North America-based company shares of Global GNSS core market, 2012. (Chart: author)
Markets and Applications
The pervasiveness of GPS-enabled applications is illustrated by the following statistics:
900 million mobile phones that incorporated GPS were sold globally in 2012.
The U.S. had 188 million smartphone subscribers and 263 million Internet users in 2013.
20% of U.S. mobile phone users get up-to-the-minute traffic or transit information.
The new industry category in the 2012 North American Industrial Classification System: “Internet publishing and broadcasting and web search portals” had U.S. revenue of $87 billion and 181,000 employees in 2012.
Google estimated that its search and advertising tools provided $111 billion in economic activity in the U.S. in 2013.
Deloitte estimated that Facebook enabled $104 billion of economic impact and 1.2 million jobs in North America in 2014.
Google Play and the Apple App Store each had more than 1.2 million apps in 2014.
How GPS Is Used. Uses of GPS include:
In agriculture for auto-steering tractors, combines and sprayers for precise operation, variable rate technology for precise placement of seed, fertilizer and pesticides, and for yield monitoring.
Managing forest health and ecological restoration, reducing fire and other hazards, and harvesting forest products.
In commercial fishing, navigation, finding fishing locations and monitoring fish catch by authorities.
In construction to direct the movement of dozers, excavators, pavers, scrapers, compactors and other heavy equipment and the placement of blades to give precise results.
In open-pit mining to guide loaders, dozers, drills and draglines.
In offshore energy exploration and development, for drilling, installations, pipe laying, diving operations, pipe inspection, repair and abandonment.
In surveying, to greatly reduce costs and to improve quality of products that rely on it.
In aviation, for navigation and monitoring positions of aircraft and for satellite-based augmentation systems (WAAS in the U.S.). GPS is the principal source for navigation for aircraft equipped with Area Navigation (RNAV) or Required Navigation Performance (RNP).
Railroad train pacing systems for cruise control, positive train control to keep track of train location and movement authorities, track defect location, and locating trucks with rail workers.
In marine transportation, for navigation, collision avoidance, communications and situational awareness and for monitoring by offshore authorities.
In vehicles, with handheld and embedded devices for navigation and fleet management.
For precise timing and time synchronization and frequency coordination (syntonization). It is used most notably in broadcasting and communications, including both cell phones and traditional telephone applications and the Internet, so packets arrive at the same time, for power generation and distribution to locate problems, and in financial services for time-stamping transactions.
In first responder services for location, navigation and communications and in emergency warnings and evacuations.
In structural monitoring of dams and bridges.
In environmental monitoring, including vegetation growth and sea-level change.
LBS and GIS
Rapid growth is taking place in location-based services (LBS) and geographic information services (GIS), which include everything from indoor location to many aspects of the Internet of Things and the “sharing economy,” and sophisticated systems for information management, analysis and display.
GPS is used for tracking and inventorying assets ranging from heavy machinery on farms and construction and mining sites, to pipes and other materials, containers in trucking sites and ports, and the location of utilities in the ground. In logistics it facilitates planning of product flow and transport.
The growth of same-day delivery — which takes advantage of Internet, cell phone, and location and navigation technologies enabled by GPS — is a continuation of the growth in just-in-time delivery that has been a phenomenon in manufacturing for several decades. Now it is having a profound effect on wholesale trade, retail trade and transportation.
The size of the LBS and GIS sectors is not defined and measured in a consistent way, and except for vehicle use, there is little information on productivity and saving in costs and time. (See sidebar box.)
LBS and GIS Market Size Estimates
For LBS and GIS, definitions and measures can vary greatly and often are not explicit.
Location-Based Services Market Size Estimates
Frost & Sullivan estimated the global LBS market at €22.8 billion in 2012 and forecast €32.0 billion in 2015.
Market and Markets estimated global LBS revenue at $8.1 billion in 2014.
Berg Insight estimated North American LBS revenue at $835 million in 2012.
(The U.S. can be assumed to spend 20–25% of the world value and about 80% of the North American value.)
Geographic information Systems Market Size Estimates
BCG estimated revenue of the U.S. GIS industry at $73 billion in 2011.
The global GIS market will reach $10.6 billion in 2015, according to a report of Global Industry Analysts in 2013.
The Canadian Geomatics study found private-sector spending of $2.3 billion in 2013. If U.S private spending was the same percentage of GDP, it would be $23.6 billion.
International Trade
Official data show a $2.3 billion U.S. deficit in trade in GPS equipment in 2013. This gives an incomplete and misleading picture of the role of the U.S. and the benefits that result. See Figure 2.
Figure 2. U.S. trade in GPS equipment, 2013 (millions of dollars). (Chart: author)
The trade numbers for GPS equipment do not include revenue for licensing, international payments received by social media and e-commerce companies, or other Internet-based revenue for which the U.S. may have a substantial net trade surplus and which are an important source of revenue and profits of U.S.-based companies.
Imports of GPS equipment software and services enable the U.S. to gain more efficient production in many applications at home and enable the U.S. to export more goods and service that rely on GPS.
Exports of GPS equipment come back to the U.S. as components that benefit U.S. businesses and consumers with more capable products and lower prices. Exports of GPS equipment enable other countries to build on the technologies and contribute to innovation, while imports enable the U.S. to share in foreign innovations. Exports of GPS equipment and associated knowledge also raise incomes in other countries, creating larger markets for U.S. goods and services.
Scope of Benefit Estimates
The U.S. benefit estimates reported here are the result of an initial effort and are not meant to be comprehensive. More work is expected to be done to fill in some of the gaps.
Sectors were chosen based on availability of information to permit relatively robust estimates and importance to the economy or policy issues. These considerations limited the number of sectors for which estimates could be made. Methods were determined based on the nature of available studies and varied among sectors. Only economic benefits were included, with health and safety and environmental benefits left for later research.
Benefits include the value to users above their costs (consumer surplus). Benefits of GPS are compared with alternatives without GPS or an application using it (counterfactuals). Estimates are gross. They are not reduced by the costs of achieving the benefits. Contributions of augmentations are included, since a quantitative basis for separating them is not available.
Estimates were primarily benefits through productivity and cost savings in operations, with savings in input costs included where their magnitudes were clear. Benefits to the rest of the economy are not included. Illustrative allowances were made for the contributions of other technologies and systems to the outcomes examined.
In the case of GPS timing, the estimates were based on the costs avoided by not having to develop an alternative timing source on the assumption that the type of alternative source possible would have evolved from the time GPS became available. The measure does not represent the value of GPS time and synchronization to the nation and to users relative to the absence of a precise time and frequency source.
Government was included in the estimates for construction, surveying, and fleet and non-fleet vehicles. For timing and non-fleet vehicle benefits, two alternative measures are averaged. Sectors with lower quality estimates — rail and maritime transportation — were included because of their importance to the economy. Shares of benefits attributable to GPS were rough assumptions. More robust estimates would require extensive data collection and interviewing in studies greatly exceeding available time and resources.
The primary focus was on productivity improvements, cost savings and cost avoidance, where costs include users’ time. Productivity increases and cost reductions allow more to be produced with the same amount of resources in the sectors utilizing the technology or allow resources to be freed up for other purposes. In that sense, they are equivalent.
When benefits are measured by productivity gains or cost savings, much of consumer surplus (the value to users above what they pay) is implicitly included. Some sources measure value by willingness-to-pay. Willingness-to-pay includes consumer surplus. It also encompasses costs of the purchase and other costs incurred by the user.
Criteria for Selecting Sectors
The potential for making sector estimates of economic benefits was categorized in three basic levels:
confident: based on robust estimates.
indicative: based on one or more less robust estimates.
notional: illustrative, if major contributions of other technologies are not separated and estimates must be based on a plausible percentage of a larger benefit, or if information is not available and estimates must be based on a percentage of market size.
Choices among categories for estimation and estimation methods depended not only on which of the basic criteria are satisfied but also on the following additional criteria:
The importance of the sector to the economy, for example as an enabler of other activities.
The potential use of benefit estimates for the category as an input into analyses of the effects of signal disruption.
Several dozen studies were assessed to determine categories for inclusion and to select studies that can form the basis of estimation. Studies for use in estimation of benefits in a category were chosen according to how well they met the following criteria:
GPS. A test of introduction of GPS or comparison with and without GPS rather than benefits of a broader service.
Coverage. Estimates that cover a major part of the category.
Robustness of estimates, including the type of review the source is likely to have had.
Consistency. If alternative better estimates are not in such a wide range that an average is less meaningful except where explainable by expected sources of variation.
Timeliness. Preference to a recent period being covered by the estimates.
U.S. Economic Benefit Estimates
Preliminary estimates of economic benefits for included U.S. sectors totaled $55.8 billion in 2013. Averaging the alternative estimates, the sum of the benefits in the two vehicle categories is $25 billion, by far the largest of the sectors estimated. Next were agriculture with $13.7 billion, and surveying with $11.6 billion.
Economic benefits are underestimated for several reasons. Some sectors are not included because of lack of information on productivity and cost savings, namely LBS other than vehicle, including asset tracking and locating people; GIS and mapping other than nautical charts, forestry, fisheries, mining, energy exploration and development, land and coastal management, weather, and scientific applications and space.
Parts of others are not included: non-grain agriculture, construction other than earthmoving, GPS in aviation for some Area Navigation (RNAV) Standard Instrument Departure Routes (SIDs) and Standard Arrival Routes STARS) and Required Navigation Performance (RNP), and rail other than positive train control.
Some estimates are conservative. The value of saved time in non-fleet vehicle transportation is based on the recommendation of the Transportation Research Board rather than the much higher value used by the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Some types of benefits are not included — specifically, benefits of GPS timing applications above the cost of alternatives, and avoided income loss, property damage and medical costs associated with reduced accidents and improved emergency response.
Increases in benefits between 2003 and 2005 are not estimated.
And, as indicated, non-economic benefits such as those to health, safety, security, reduced loss of life and to the environment are not yet addressed.
Benefits as measured thus far are about 0.3% of GDP in one year. If all of the excluded sources of benefits were quantified, the benefits would be much larger.
Estimating Benefits for Sectors
U.S. economic benefits of GPS for grain farming were estimated for farms with grain sales of $250 million or more. The same method as was applied for earthmoving in construction.
A composite range of percentages of productivity gains and cost savings of 18–25% was determined from various studies. In the case of grain farming, benefits also come from yield increases due to improvements in plant health. The productivity gains used in the calculations incorporated both sources of benefits. Productivity was taken together with market size and an estimate of 68% adoption of technologies taking advantage of GPS to compute initial estimates of benefits. A notional adjustment was then made to exclude the contributions of other technologies and GNSSs. While having the adjustment determined by a group of experts would have been preferred, that was not possible with the time and resource constraints of the study.
Benefits of GPS machine guidance with earthmoving in construction were calculated based on an 8–12% share of construction for earthmoving operations, a benefit of 18–22% and a 20–25% adoption rate, relying on a number of sources.
For surveying, an estimate of market size was constructed based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data on numbers of surveyors, cartographers and photogrammetrists in the engineering services industry vs. the rest of the economy, together with revenue data for private surveying and mapping from the Economic Census. This was combined with a composite estimate of productivity gains over conventional surveying of 45–55% and an assumption of 100% adoption.
The benefit values for air transportation were estimated for the study by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) based on effects of WAAS and performance-based navigation (PBN). The rail estimates cover only positive train control, which is in early stages of implementation. Information is highly uncertain, but impacts as of 2013 are small. Maritime benefits were based on updating an earlier estimate of benefits of the private-sector value of nautical charts. The estimates for fleet vehicle-connected telematics were based on savings found in an extensive survey of fleet customers over a five-year period.
Timing benefits were based on the avoided costs from not having to develop an alternative source of timing. Alternatives considered were eLoran and a system of three geostationary satellites. Since there would have been strong pressures to develop an authoritative timing source in the absence of GPS timing, it was assumed that one of the alternatives would have been developed rather than assuming as in other cases that technologies in use when GPS became available would have continued in use.
Two estimates also were made for consumer and other non-fleet vehicle use. One was based on extrapolating results of a study of consumer willingness to pay for navigation services, and the other on time saved by navigation services.
Part of the benefits of LBS other than those that are vehicle-related and for GIS are implicitly included in estimates for sectors that use them.
Data and Research Needs
Additional work would be desirable to extend and refine the GPS economic benefit estimates, quantify safety-of-life and environmental benefits, examine international benefits, assess potential future benefits and consider loss from denial of GPS. Benefits of many new and rapidly growing services are yet to be quantified.
Systematic research is needed to fill in gaps in adoption, productivity and cost savings with comparative before-and-after studies as well as with case studies. Robust studies require major and often multi-year efforts involving targeted data collection, which are rarely done by government or academics for GNSS. Information needs to be much more granular, taking into account specific functions in which GNSS is used (such as plowing, seeding, fertilizing, harvesting), specific GNSS and non-GNSS technologies employed in each function at each site, and extent of their use.
Also, results for GPS might be improved or at least be more acceptable if the contribution of other technologies and GNSSs to measured benefits were assessed by a group of knowledgeable individuals rather than by a single researcher.
Information on market size, penetration and growth from market research firms, which tends to capture recent developments, is based on greatly varying sources and methods, resulting in major gaps and great divergence in estimates, especially in new or rapidly growing areas like LBS and GIS. The North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS) and its application in federal data collection such as in the Economic Census lags far behind in recognizing new categories and providing sufficient detail. Lags in data collection and research lead to understatement of the use and benefits of GPS.
Looking to the Future
Future benefits are expected to be even greater because of evolution of technologies, expansion of GNSS systems, creation of new products and markets, and growth and penetration of markets. The possibilities are suggested by the numerous nascent applications that have been emerging. Many will be enabled by expanding GNSS systems, signals and capabilities in conjunction with geographic expansion and increased capabilities in wireless systems.
The progression of platforms is long and growing: mainframes, PCs, mobile phones and other handheld devices, tablets, game controllers, wearables, TVs, home appliances, air and space — including planes, UAVs, satellites, planets, moons, rovers, rockets and spaceships.
The widespread availability of platforms and the growing ability to utilize them promises a long way to go in developing applications and deriving benefits.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks the PNT Advisory Board and Gov. Jim Geringer, liaison from the board to the study; Jason Kim of the Department of Commerce who oversaw the project; Jim Miller of NASA; and the members of the interagency Economic Study Team that advised the effort. Numerous additional people in and out of government provided information and assistance. Responsibility for the content and findings rests with the author.
IRV LEVESON, who has a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University, is an economic and strategy consultant and founder of Leveson Consulting. He has done extensive work on GNSS markets and issues for more than 10 years. He is a member of the Institute of Navigation, the American Economic Association and the National Association for Business Economics.
NASA’s Ikhana is being used to test a system that will allow uncrewed aircraft to fly routine operations within the National Airspace System. (Credit: NASA)
NASA plans to install a Locata network (LocataNet) as the core positioning technology for safety-critical unmanned aerial systems (UAS) research at its Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., according to an announcement by Locata.
NASA Langley is tasked with performing rigorous and repeatable scientific evaluation of new UAS safety and technology concepts under development. The LocataNet will provide high-precision non-GPS-based positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) that is essential for this work. Known for its long history of aeronautics research, NASA Langley is a key center for UAS research and development. In June, one of Langley’s unmanned hexacopters (a drone with six rotors) delivered medical supplies to a clinic, the first such delivery by an unmanned drone.
Locata’s centimeter-accurate positioning will now assist NASA to develop and improve flight-critical technology systems that support air transportation safety, efficiency and performance. Langley’s extensive state-of-the-art facilities will be further enhanced with the installation of the LocataNet.
The NASA LocataNet is scheduled to be installed and commissioned before the end of 2015. Locata will supply the LocataLite Transmitters and Locata receivers required by NASA for the installation. Aviation-quality Locata antennas, developed by Cooper Antennas (UK) and previously used by the U.S. Air Force in its own military LocataNets, will also be installed. Locata engineers will support the physical installation, ongoing training and the future technical support required by NASA Langley for this world-first UAS deployment.
Locata Corporation has invented new terrestrial positioning networks which function as local, ground-based replicas of GPS. These networks can be thought of as “GPS hotspots,” according to the company. Locata has amassed 146 granted patents to date protecting these innovations, with many more patents in the works.
Locata is currently shipping commercial systems to demanding and professional end users such as the USAF, NASA, Leica Geosystems, and many others. Locata enables their integration partners to extend GPS-like positioning coverage to modern industrial, commercial, consumer and government applications in areas where GPS is erratic, jammed or unavailable.
“Locata is proud and delighted to have received an order for NASA’s first LocataNet. Globally significant installations like this prove Locata’s new technology is delivering unprecedented levels of performance to many important new applications,” said Nunzio Gambale, Locata CEO. “As our technology roll-out begins to gain pace, the exceptional value Locata brings to next-gen mobile apps has attracted interest from players all over the world. In fact, our list of relationships is now looking like a roster of the world’s crème-de-la-crème. I honestly can’t think of a better or more prestigious name than NASA to add to our growing partner list.”
“Our team is savoring the opportunity to work alongside NASA engineers and we’re excited that Locata will help advance the safety-critical performance of Unmanned Aerial Systems,” he continued. “Almost all future mobile devices or machines, be they on the road, in the air, on a mine site, in a port, in a warehouse, in your mobile phone, or part of the inevitable Internet of Things — all of them are critically dependent on pervasive, reliable, high-accuracy positioning. Locata is being leveraged into these next-gen systems because it’s clear that satellite-based solutions alone can no longer deliver what’s required. Soon, as we bring miniaturized Locata transmitters and receivers to market, our innovations will enable even greater advances in cutting-edge consumer, commercial, and government applications.”
NASA Testing Program. As part of its UAS research, NASA is testing a system that would make it possible for unmanned aircraft to fly routine operations in United States airspace. Through the agency’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration in the National Airspace System (UAS-NAS) project, NASA, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. (GA-ASI) and Honeywell International, Inc., are flying a series of tests which began on June 17 and will run through July at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in California.
“We are excited to continue our partnership with GA-ASI and Honeywell to collect flight test data that will aid in the development of standards necessary to safely integrate these aircraft into the National Airspace System,” said Laurie Grindle, UAS-NAS project manager at Armstrong.
This is the third series of tests that builds upon the success of similar experiments conducted late last year that demonstrated a proof-of-concept sense-and-avoid system. The tests engage the core air traffic infrastructure and supporting software components through a live and virtual environment to demonstrate how a remotely piloted aircraft interacts with air traffic controllers and other air traffic.
“This is the first time that we are flight testing all of the technology developments from the project at the same time,” Grindle said.
This series of tests is made up of two phases. The first is focused on validation of sensor, trajectory and other simulation models using live data. Some of the tests will be flown with an Ikhana aircraft, based at Armstrong, that has been equipped with an updated sense-and-avoid system, as well as other advanced software from Honeywell.
Other tests will involve an S-3B plane from NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, serving as a high-speed piloted surrogate aircraft. Both tests will use other aircraft following scripted flight paths to intrude on the flight path the remotely-piloted craft is flying, prompting it to either issue an alert or maneuver out of the other aircraft’s path. These flights will also conduct the first full test of the traffic alert and collision avoidance system (TCAS II) on a remotely piloted aircraft.
During the June 17 test, which lasted a little more than five hours, the team accomplished 14 encounters using the Ikhana aircraft and a Honeywell-owned Beech C90 King Air acting as the intruder. A second test was flown the following day, with a total of 23 encounters. The project team plans to fly more than 200 encounters throughout the first phase of the test series.
“Our researchers and project engineers will be gathering a substantial amount of data to validate their pilot maneuver guidance and alerting logic that has previously been evaluated in simulations,” said Heather Maliska, Armstrong’s UAS-NAS deputy project manager.
The second phase of the third test series will begin in August and will include a T-34 plane equipped with a proof-of-concept control and non-payload communications system. It will evaluate how well the systems work together so that the aircraft pilots itself, interacts with air traffic controllers and remains well clear of other aircraft while executing its operational mission. The aircraft, which will have an onboard safety pilot, will fly an operationally representative mission in a virtual airspace sector complete with air traffic control and live and virtual traffic.
