I-Corps: A Community-Driven Precision GPS Service

Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN

Investigators

Abstract

The high cost and technical complexity of current precision positioning solutions make them inaccessible to a large market segment that would be otherwise inclined to use such solutions. Some examples of these potential market applications include the tracking of extreme sport activities, precision agriculture, intelligent transportation, navigation of unmanned vehicles, such as UAVs, robots, personal drones,as well as sensor data collection for use in academia and by government agencies, or even do-it-yourself land surveying. Customers in these markets must currently make do with the decreased accuracies available to them given their budgetary constraints, or they must pay exorbitant prices for custom hardware solutions. The proposed will bridge the gap between cost and accuracy and capture the market share of independent developers and small businesses that either do not have the time, the resources, or the money to spend on existing solutions. This team proposes to build a precision absolute positioning service. The proposed innovation introduces a network of stationary receivers at known locations, such that the position relative to any one of these stationary nodes will result in coordinates in an absolute geodetic coordinate space. Additionally, this team proposes to carry out the localization procedure in a cloud-based infrastructure which will enable performing much more computationally complex operations as well as fuse data across multiple sensors to increase the accuracy of the system even further. We believe this always-on, always-ready cloud-based positioning platform will nicely abstract away most of the major problems that developers needing precision location information currently face. The levels of accuracy achievable by the proposed system are sufficient for many applications, and although the proposed solution currently relies on relative localization results, the placement of a few receivers at well-known locations would open the door for an absolute localization service that could run in the cloud.