Sarnoff researchers tout GPS fail-safe system

Researchers at the Sarnoff Corporation in Princeton, New Jersey claim to have built a better GPS system, one that'll never fail, even when confronted with impenetrable obstacles like tall buildings, tunnels, and for the spelunkers among you, caves. The secret ingredient, it seems, is a new video processing technology the Sarnoff researchers have developed, which makes use of two forward-facing and two rear-facing cameras placed on a vehicle or helmet that capture stereoscopic video to help determine the location of the vehicle when the GPS goes dark. The complete workings of the technology are still under wraps, but according to the MIT Technology Review, the system can pinpoint the position of a vehicle or individual to within one meter after traversing a half a kilometer without access to GPS. As you can probably guess, there's no indication as to when the technology might actually be available for public consumption, although based on the source of funding, the Office of Naval Research, you can safely bet that the military will get its hands on it before you or we do.

[Via Navigadget]

[mespinosam @ Dec 5th 2006 6:47PM]

Now market it to the billionaire spelunking, base-jumping crowd.

[fruhtloops514 @ Dec 5th 2006 7:37PM]

ha, sarnoff is literally 30 seconds from my house. it's cool to see talk about them on the web.

[Tom Gabriele @ Dec 5th 2006 7:43PM]

i bet it works kind of like an optical mouse - the cameras track the direction and speed of what the cameras are seeing

[kaztm @ Dec 5th 2006 8:09PM]

What are the advantages over the conventional inertial navigation found in many GPS-based car navigation systems?
Portability?

[Ryan @ Dec 5th 2006 9:38PM]

This sounds like an overly complex solution to a problem that's already been solved. Currently several of the high end garmin units as well as other brand gps units have a dead reckoning accelerometer feature, in addition to a connection to the vehicle's obdc speed output to measure distance.

One of the methods used way back in the days before gps and before land based radio telemetry systems.... commercial aircraft used a gyroscope system to navigate. I believe i read it had to be set to the airport's lad/lon everytime the plane left and after a thousand mile round trip on return to the airport it would only be off by 50 feet or so. I would be suprised if there wasn't an equivalent modern technology that could be used with electronic accelerometers (similar to how those suunto / nike / polar running pedometers work with the shoe mounted accelerometer).

[Wouter Schut @ Dec 6th 2006 2:40AM]

Why not add (a laser and) a camera beneath a car and record the movement just like a computer mouse?

[kaztm @ Dec 6th 2006 3:46AM]

"Why not add (a laser and) a camera beneath a car and record the movement just like a computer mouse?"

Very interesting idea, Wouter.
Although several suspects come to mind such as resolution, computational power requirement, cost, and detection of angular velocity, I guess there should be ways to overcome these issues. Perhaps it IS the way to go...