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Orion Labs has released Advanced Location Services, a high-accuracy, carrier-independent 3D location platform delivered via Polaris Wireless.

The service provides enterprises and public safety agencies with pinpoint location, indoors and in high-rise buildings, with floor-level and room-level accuracy, a difficult challenge in such GPS-denied environments.

The system enables customers to locate team members on the vertical axis accurate to three meters’ distance, to keep teams better-informed and better-connected, enhance team performance and improve worker safety. It works via Orion Sync, a standalone smart walkie-talkie, or as device as a service, in a smartphone form factor.

“For our hospitality and retail customers, this offers the opportunity to greatly improve guest services and the experience they deliver. For public safety and healthcare customers, the integration has the potential to save lives,” said Jesse Robbins, founder and CEO.

According to co-founder and CTO Greg Albrecht, “With 3D location tracking, hospitality teams can easily pinpoint where their guest service workers are located and identify the right team member for faster guest response for tasks like bringing up clean towels to a guest, fixing a TV or lightbulb in a guestroom, or clearing trays and carts,” he said.

The system also protects lone workers. “When lone workers call for help, security teams can rapidly dispatch assistance without the lone worker needing to explain their location,” Albrecht said. “This is the same kind of technology that first responders are now adopting to accurately and rapidly locate 911 callers facing life-threatening situations.”

Hotel workers suffer work-related incidents, encompassing physical injuries, medical emergencies, theft and sexual harassment, nearly 50 percent more than is the average across all other industries. Large metropolitan hotels can approximate small cities, with as many as 5,000 rooms, 12,000 guests, and 8,000 employees. Even a moderate-sized hotel can have hundreds of employees scattered across many floors, some remote from central operations. Locating employees quickly is key to preventing or minimizing incidents.

Need maps. A fundamental challenge in developing 3D location awareness indoors is the need for accurate, detailed 3D renderings of the physical buildings themselves.

“For most buildings, this has never been done before and is often an arduous task to accomplish,” Albrecht added. “However, there is a mapping process to allow for precise data points to be leveraged within the Orion platform. It’s a very simple task that can be completed even by the hotel staff at the time of setup. After that, it’s extremely simple to set up teams within the Orion System with a 3D view of their property that they can use.”

The latest integration is undergoing tests at locations in Las Vegas and San Francisco, with more than 50 locations actively using the set-up.

In March, Polaris Wireless, a provider of software-based 3D location solutions to wireless operators, law enforcement and government agencies, and location-based application companies, announced the commercial availability of its high-accuracy carrier-independent 3D location platform for application developers.

In early 2018, Polaris Wireless participated in the CTIA’s Test Bed LLC Stage Z independent vertical location testing in San Francisco, Atlanta and Chicago, achieving floor-level accuracy.

New initiatives from the Navigation Innovation and Support Programme (NAVISP), a program of the European Space Agency (ESA), have targeted counter-jamming and counter-spoofing efforts, as Europe’s Galileo program gains progressive foothold in the marketplace, particularly in safety-critical systems such as driverless cars.

“We are looking for new and disruptive ideas in navigation and that is why we created NAVISP,” said ESA Director General Jan Wörner.

TeleConsult Austria is working with JH Joanneum University of Applied Sciences on the GNSS Interference Detection and Analysis System (GIDAS), to automatically detect, classify and pinpoint all intentional interference sources within a given area by monitoring all civil GNSS signals in real time.The aim is to build a multi-frequency scalable system. GIDAS plans to begin commercialization at the end of 2019.

France Developpement Conseil has developed a hardened satnav module called DRACONAV, combining hardware and software to combat jamming and spoofing. Targeting intelligent transport applications, it seeks to identify cyber attacks and continue to provide authenticated positioning information as they occur.

DRACONAV would deliver a level of confidence to let users know if they can continue relying on the data the module delivers, and yield an estimate of the receiver’s true position as the attack continues. A prototype design has undergone more than 3,000 kilometers of field tests and is moving to industrialization.

Intecs Solutions of Italy has created G-Passion, using a software-defined radi

o to analyze a few tens or hundreds of milliseconds of Galileo signals at a time, to tell the user whether or not the signal is authentic or spoofed.
In Romania, InSpace Engineering’ MARGOT assesses the multipath and interference impact on PNT information in maritime environments.

The Norwegian company SINTEF is developing its Advanced Radio Frequency Interference Detection, Alerting and Analysis System (ARFIDAAS) project, offering as wide a spectral coverage as possible — including all current GPS, Galileo and GLONASS signals — to identify disruptions due to intentional or unintentional interference.

UK company Helix Technologies has developed compact helical antennas, built around a dielectric ceramic core, primarily for driverless cars. The multi-frequency design aims to reduce susceptibility to interference as well as multipath. Testing will soon get underway in several European cities.

The U.S. Army will send prototype anti-jamming systems to its 2nd Cavalry Regiment, stationed in Europe, in September to aid forces under GPS jamming or spoofing conditions. The first generation of Mounted Assured PNT Systems (MAPS) and anti-jam antennas are nearly ready for integration aboard armored Stryker vehicles, and the Army is already evaluating proposals for an upgraded version incorporating an inertial navigation system (INS) for further resilience.

The shipment comes in response to widespread Russian jamming of GPS signals from the sub-Arctic to the Middle East, and in tacit, likely tardy acknowledgment of Russian superiority in electronic warfare.

Col. Nickolas Kioutas, Army project manager for Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) announced the move at the annual C4ISRnet conference in Arlington, Virginia. C4ISR stands for Command, Control, Communications, Computer, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance, or more broadly, electronic and other systems, procedures and techniques used to collect and disseminate information.

Three vendors are providing prototypes for the IMU-equipped second-generation MAPS, or MAPS-2, with testing to begin in September. A MAPS-3 capability, drawing on lessons learned in 1 and 2, may get underway soon. GPS Source, now a subsidiary of General Dynamics Mission Systems, made MAPS-1 and is now competing for MAPS-2.

The initiative reflects a new approach by the Army of “doing much smaller, iterative programs,” according to Col Kioutas. Traditionally, U.S. armed forces have taken years (and sometimes more years) to develop large, complex weaponry and supporting systems, and then even longer to deploy them. By the time they arrive in the operational theater, they are obsolete.

Rapid deployment of smaller, quickly designed and manufactured batches creates the opportunity for rapid feedback on what works and what doesn’t, with equally rapid return to the design board and re-manufacture. In other words, “shoot, aim, ready.”

Kioutas and crew are also flouting another U.S. military tenet, that in which previously “[we] asked for exactly what we wanted and industry built exactly to that. We don’t know exactly what we want. Tell us how we should do this the best, and then we’ll test that.” The PNT program has left requirements broad and open to change, knowing how quickly technology develops — and is shown to be vulnerable.

The Stryker is an eight-wheeled armored fighting vehicle, basically a lightly armored tank or heavily-armored troop carrier that is more road-friendly, that is, faster, than a tank.  It has several variants of armament, armor and troop-carrying capacity. It saw extensive use in the Iraq counter-insurgency campaign.

The Intel RealSense Depth Camera D435i, designed for positioning and maneuvering mobile robots and other portable systems, includes an inertial measurement unit (IMU) that enables developers to create solutions with advanced depth-sensing and tracking capabilities. Intel introduced the camera in 2018 and an advanced version early this year.

As robots, drones and other autonomous mobile devices must —eventually — interact independently and intelligently with their environments, they must track their locations as they move, navigating unfamiliar spaces while discovering, monitoring and avoiding still and moving obstacles in real time.

Moving toward that goal, the D435i includes two fisheye lens sensors, an IMU and an Intel Movidius Myriad 2 video processing unit (VPU), a system-on-chip component for image processing and computer vision at very high performance per watt.

Vision-based simultaneous localization and mapping (V‑SLAM) algorithms run directly on the VPU with very low latency. The T265 has demonstrated less than 1% closed-loop drift under intended use conditions. It also offers sub 6 ms latency between movement and reflection of movement in the pose.

The RealSense device measures 1 x 0.5 x 4 inches (108 mm x 24.5 mm x 12.5 mm), weighs around two ounces (55 g), and draws 1.5 watts to operate the entire system, including the cameras, IMU and VPU. Its spatial sensing and tracking capabilities are based on technology developed by RealityCap, acquired by Intel in 2015.

The camera performs inside-out tracking: it does not depend on external sensors to understand its environment. Tracking is based on information gathered from the two fisheye cameras, each with a 163-degree range of view (±5 degrees) and capturing images at 30 frames per second. The wide field of view from each sensor keeps points of reference visible to the system for a relatively long time, even if moving quickly.

Visual-Inertial Odometry. A key strength of visual-inertial odometry is that the sensors complement each other. The images from the camera are supplemented by data from the onboard IMU, which includes a gyroscope and accelerometer. The aggregated data from these sensors is fed into the SLAM algorithms.

The algorithm identifies sets of salient features in the environment, such as a corner of a room or object that can be recognized over time to infer the device’s changing position relative to those points.

The visual information prevents long-term drift from the inertial that degrades position accuracy. The IMU operates at a higher frequency than the cameras, allowing for quicker response and recognition by the algorithm to changes in the device’s position. A map of visual features and their positions is built up over time. In re-localization, the camera uses the features it has seen before to recognize when it has returned to a familiar place. The camera can locate its point of origin with an error margin of less than one percent.

Drone testing demonstrated that, in both cases, the tracking and position data generated by the peripheral was closely correlated with what was provided by GPS. This supports the viability of using it for navigation in areas where GPS is not available, such as under a bridge or inside an industrial structure.

Congress mandated movement in December 2017.

The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) says it will implement a terrestrial timing system to complement and back up GPS signals, and plans to demonstrate the new system “towards the end of the calendar year.”

The demo is anticipated to include a range of technologies, including among others local positioning systems such as Locata and NextNav, wide-area coverage by eLoran, and — though the parameters of DOT’s mandate specified terrestrial backup — space-based signals furnished by Satelles.

The statement came in response to an inquiry in March from the House of Representatives’ Transportation and Infrastructure Committee concerning progress on a GPS Backup Technology Demonstration that was mandated in December 2017. Although funds were appropriated for the project, committee chair Peter DeFazio of Oregon saw little to no evidence of work being done, and so required a status report.

DOT issued a Request for Information (RFI) on May 3, with a due date of June 3. The RFI asked for “readiness-level six” technologies (bearing demonstrated results in a relevant environment) “capable of providing backup positioning, navigation, and/or timing services to critical infrastructure in the event of a temporary disruption to GPS.

“This demonstration effort also is expected to encompass technologies capable of providing complementary PNT functions to GPS by either expanding PNT capabilities, including cross checks, or extending them to GPS or Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-denied or degraded user environments.”

The DOT said it is “interested in leveraging PNT service technology initiatives.” Possibly, the agency intends to contract for a service rather than build a new system.

Congress first required DOT to establish an operational terrestrial timing system to back up GPS signals, then expanded that definition to include positioning and navigation services.

Systems or services, or combinations thereof, must now provide all three functions.

This week, the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) convened leaders from state departments of Transportation, stakeholders in academia, and representatives from the auto industry in Washington, D.C., to discuss the importance of preserving the 5.9 GHz spectrum for transportation safety.

The 5.9 GHz band supports vehicle-to-everything (V2X), a wireless technology that enables data exchanges between a vehicle and its surroundings. Starting with advanced technology development and demonstrations about 20 years ago, America has deployed 54 operational V2X projects, improving safety today, with more in the pipeline.

Vehicle manufacturers are planning to equip new cars with the technology. This next generation of intelligent transportation communications promises to improve safety for drivers and for vulnerable roadway users, such as pedestrians, bicyclists, disabled persons and transit users.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates that full adoption of just two V2X safety applications would prevent about half a million crashes and save approximately 1,000 lives a year. As more safety applications are developed for vehicles, more lives could be saved.

V2X will also support an efficient, safe, and smooth transportation system, with vehicles communicating with traffic lights to improve the flow of traffic. V2X applications such as dynamic traffic signal control and prioritization have the potential to reduce travel times by up to 27% and reduce fuel emissions.

The SafeAir System is a smart parachute system that monitors UAS flight in real time, identifies critical failures, and autonomously triggers a parachute.

Drone safety company ParaZero Technologies Ltd., together with the Northern Plains UAS Test Site (NPUASTS), has completed the testing and compliance process for ParaZero’s SafeAir Mavic in accordance with U.S. ASTM F3322-18.

The ASTM F3322-18 Standard Specification for UAS Parachutes was designed to enable civil aviation authorities (CAAs), like the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), to determine whether a parachute system is airworthy for flight over human beings.

Among other requirements, the standard defines more than 45 aerial deployment tests in various failure scenarios, verified by a third party.

ParaZero’s ASTM-compliant SafeAir Mavic is designed specifically for DJI’s Mavic 2 series. The SafeAir System is a smart parachute system that monitors UAS flight in real time, identifies critical failures, and autonomously triggers a parachute. The system contains a flight termination system, a black box to enable post-deployment analysis, and a warning buzzer to alert people below of the falling drone.

Safe UAV flights over people. The completion of the compliance process for the SafeAir Mavic will open the doors for UAS operators that are interested in the possibility of safe and legal UAS operations over people using the DJI Mavic 2. The FAA has granted a waiver for flight over people to an operator using ParaZero’s ASTM compliant SafeAir Phantom.

The third-party validation provided by NPUASTS — an FAA UAV test site in North Dakota — played a crucial role in the ParaZero testing. The ParaZero project is in line with the work the NPUASTS is doing to promote the safe integration of UAS into the National Airspace System.

The ability to safely operate UAS over people and in urban environments through waivers and approval is important for the growth of the UAS industry.

“Third-party validation of the SafeAir Safety System for the Mavic is a necessary step for the industry to help advance operations of small UAS in various environments,” said Nicholas Flom, NPUASTS executive director. “With the partnership from ParaZero, we are one step closer to realizing routine flight operations over persons on the ground.”

UAS operators can now purchase the ASTM-compliant SafeAir Mavic on ParaZero’s website. UAS operators will also receive compliance documentation with the purchase of the SafeAir Mavic system, including NPUASTS’ third-party testing report. This documentation and report will provide validation that operators can submit to the FAA with an operations-over-people waiver application.

“Following the precedent setting waiver announced earlier this week, we are excited to launch our second ASTM compliant SafeAir System,” said Avi Lozowick, vice president of policy and strategy at ParaZero. “We are lucky to have partners like NPUASTS for this process; their aviation experience is second to none.”

The ZED-F9K turnkey solution minimizes the effort required to achieve decimeter-level positioning accuracy in automotive applications.

Siemens has integrated the u-blox ZED-F9K high-precision dead-reckoning module into its Toyota Prius V2X (vehicle-to-everything) test fleet. Siemens carried out live demonstrations of the technology at ITS European Congress 2019 in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.

As the only available source of absolute position, GNSS-based positioning plays a crucial role in advanced driver automation systems and driverless vehicles. The same is true in V2X communication, in which vehicles continuously share their location and other information with other traffic participants — cars and pedestrians — as well as surrounding infrastructure, improving road safety and reducing traffic congestion.

V2X test vehicles typically determine their position using high-end GNSS  receivers. By opting to use the ZED-F9K, Siemens was able to align the performance of their test fleet with real-world conditions while also reducing the cost and the engineering effort required to develop their vehicles.

“We’ve had a very positive experience with u-blox’s ZED-F9K high precision dead reckoning solution. The product delivered strongly from the initial design-in to the data and performance in our first tests,” said Igor Passchier, engineering fellow, Connected and Automated Driving at Siemens PLM Software.

“Our collaboration with Siemens shows the extent to which the ZED-F9K turnkey solution saves OEMs time, cost, and engineering effort while providing decimeter-level positioning performance,” said Alex Ngi, Product Strategy for Dead Reckoning, Product Center Positioning, u-blox. “For us, it has also been a welcome opportunity to contribute to solving the challenges in the autonomous driving ecosystem.”

SoftBank plans to introduce a centimeter-accurate, real-time satnav-based positioning service, specifically using Japan’s Quasi-Zenith Satellite System (QZSS), to guide autonomous vehicles across a range of industries in Japan. The company said it will install more than 3,300 control points at base stations across Japan to deliver centimeter-level accuracy over its mobile network coverage area to provide real-time kinematic (RTK) positioning.

Testing begins in July with a scheduled launch of commercial service by the end of November. Test partners include Yanmar Agribusiness Co., Ltd., a provider of autonomous assisted driving for agricultural machinery, Kajima Corporation, which performs construction site management with automatically controlled drones for aerial photography and monitoring, and SB Drive Corp., a provider of autonomous and assisted driving technology for buses.

SoftBank is developing proprietary low-cost GNSS receivers so that “new services and market expansion can be realized.” A Positioning Core System provided by ALES Corp. will generate correctional data based on signals received and transmitted by SoftBank’s own control points over SoftBank’s mobile communications network to agricultural and construction machinery, self-driving cars, drones and other equipment carrying GNSS receivers. The company expects that centimeter-level positioning can thus be done in real time.

In addition to control points at its own base stations, SoftBank will use the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan’s approximately 1,300 GPS-based control stations.

SoftBank is also developing services to enablec loud-based RTK positioning for devices without GNSS receivers. Cloud-based RTK will provide centimeter-level, location-based services for equipment that needs to be miniature and energy-efficient, such as infrastructure surveillance sensors and wearable devices.

SoftBank Group Corp. is a Japanese multinational conglomerate holding company headquartered in Tokyo. It owns operations in broadband, fixed-line telecommunications, e-commerce, internet, technology services, finance, semiconductor design and more. It is the 36th largest public company in the world, and the 2nd largest in Japan.

ALES is a joint venture established by SoftBank and Enabler in July 2018. Enabler employs GNSS and related technologies to produce such products/services as a synchronization solution for mobile base stations for subway stations and a patented indoor positioning/time synchronization infrastructure platform in Japan.

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Featured image: Softbank

When I was a kid, two of my hometown’s burger drive-ins attracted the hungry attention of my sister and myself, causing us to hound our parents to take us “out to dinner” upon the slightest pretext. Only one of them, however, boasted a sign claiming “400 million served.”

This was a staggering number to an eight-year-old. I hypothesized that everyone in the world must have consumed several by now — a very good argument for me to have one tonight.

The desire to provoke similar reasoning could form part of the motivation for the China Satellite Navigation Office to announce that sales of BeiDou-based chips have exceeded 80 million. Ran Chengqi, director of the CSNO, delivered the number in a report on the 10th China Satellite Navigation Conference held in Beijing on May 22.

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“It would be stretching a point to say that satnav chips are the burgers of the future, but it’s not an exaggeration to assert that they are becoming a commodity on the world market.”

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Now, 80 million falls well short of 400 million, but that next hurdle is well within reach, considering the size, potential and explosive growth of the Chinese market, to say nothing of others along the Great Belt and Road, a global development area of infrastructure development and investments in 152 countries and organizations in Asia, Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

The BeiDou number pales in comparison to the 3.15 billion units of total GNSS chips that global consumption is expected to hit in 2022. By a reasonable projection, BeiDou-enabled chips will by then constitute a major if not the lion’s share of that number.

Of course, GPS-enabled chips will form a greater majority, if not the totality. All chips will — unless the world radically changes — be GPS-enabled to start, and then have some combination of other GNSS in addition.

Big Numbers. Ran Chengqi further said that 22-nanometer dual-frequency BeiDou chips are ready for commercial applications.

According to the China Global Television Network, 116 new positioning-capable cellphone models applied to enter the Chinese market in the first quarter of 2019; 82 of them carry BeiDou-enabled chips. The latest government report on the scale of China’s satnav industry anticipates it will reach 400 billion yuan (US$ 57.8 billion) by 2020.

The news agency stated that more than six million vehicles in 36 cities use BeiDou; long-distance operations and precision farming help raise output by 5% while saving 10% of fuel costs; and more than 70,000 fishing vessels employ BeiDou’s short messaging service.

BeiDou’s rapid success in a relatively short term echoes that of GPS and GNSS in general. It would be stretching a point to say that satnav chips are the burgers of the future, but it’s not any exaggeration or distortion to assert that they are becoming — if they have not already become — a commodity on the world market.

By the way, those golden arches have since 1994 stopped counting and updating their published burger tally. All the signs simply say “billions and billions served.”