PFI:AIR - TT: High-precision, low-cost GPS cloud service

Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN

Investigators

Abstract

This PFI: AIR Technology Translation project addresses the void between expensive, survey-grade outdoor GPS-based localization technologies and low-cost, lower-accuracy techniques, such as the ones found in smartphones. The technology is based upon a novel GPS-based methodology that marries the precision found in industrial-grade methodologies with the low costs of off-the-shelf consumer-grade components. Current competing solutions (RTK, D-GPS, etc.) suffer from high cost, technical complexity, and other constraints, making them inaccessible to a large market segment of potential users. The lack of affordable and accurate solutions restricts the availability of further innovations and better product offerings by companies and developers in location-aware markets that would be otherwise inclined to use such solutions, including applications such as sports tracking, self driving cars, drones, and do-it-yourself land surveying. Successful completion of this project will result in a robust and scalable prototype, providing accuracies approaching those of professional-grade positioning in a viable consumer-grade price range. This will enable further innovation in this field, and it may lead to new application areas that have not yet been conceived due to limitations of the current state of the art. The project addresses a number of known technology gaps as it translates from research discovery toward commercial application, including 1) developing a novel approach for combining inertial and GPS measurements without a stationary calibration phase, 2) making the technology robust in challenging GPS environments such as dense urban areas and forests, and 3) devising a new approach to "Localization as a Service" by integrating the algorithms in a scalable cloud platform, utilizing a potentially crowd-sourced network of low-cost base stations for increased robustness and accuracy. Some of these contributions are novel research areas themselves and some are based on known techniques, but each one is made possible due to the interplay between the contributions as a whole and the basic GPS-based localization research upon which this translation project is built. The result of overcoming these technical hurdles and integrating them into a cloud-based platform will be an easy-to-use, low-complexity localization service that can provide professional-grade accuracies at a fraction of the cost of existing commercial solutions. In addition to producing an industrial-grade prototype, the team members involved in this project, including a postdoctoral researcher and a graduate student, will receive invaluable entrepreneurial and academia-to-industry technology translation experiences, not only through continued interactions with potential customers, but also by navigating the business and legal landscape of licensing the existing IP from Vanderbilt University, developing strategic partnerships with businesses who desire to integrate this product into their own, and learning how to best utilize the resources available, both from academia and from industry.