Goodbye GPS! The gen-next navigation system to use cellular signals

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Global Positioning System (GPS) is a very important tool that helps millions of smartphone users reach their final destination without being lost. But if we tell you that soon your all-time-favorite GPS will be a thing of past in days to come, will you believe us? A team of researchers at the University of California, Riverside has invented a highly reliable and accurate navigation system that uses existing environmental signals such as cellular and Wi-Fi, rather than GPS.

Apart from being used as a standalone alternative to GPS, this technology can also be used to develop navigation systems that meet the needs of fully autonomous vehicles like driverless cars and unmanned drones, revealed the researchers. It will further enable current GPS-based systems to enable highly reliable, consistent, and tamper-proof navigation.

The research team, which was led by Zak Kassas--assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in UCR's Bourns College of Engineering—revealed that current GPS/INS systems will not meet the demands of future autonomous vehicles for three major reasons:

1. GPS signals alone are extremely weak and unusable in certain environments like deep canyons.
2. GPS signals are susceptible to intentional and unintentional jamming and interference.
3. Civilian GPS signals are unencrypted, unauthenticated, and specified in publicly available documents, making them spoofable.

According to Kassas, "By adding more and more sensors, researchers are throwing 'everything but the kitchen sink' to prepare autonomous vehicle navigation systems for the inevitable scenario that GPS signals become unavailable. We took a different approach, which is to exploit signals that are already out there in the environment."

Instead of adding more internal sensors, Kassas and his team in UCR's Autonomous Systems Perception, Intelligence, and Navigation (ASPIN) Laboratory have been developing autonomous vehicles that could tap into the hundreds of signals around us at any point in time, like cellular, radio, television, Wi-Fi, and other satellite signals.

In the research, Kassas' team showcased ongoing research that exploits these existing communications signals, called "signals of opportunity (SOP)" for navigation. The system can be used by itself, or, more likely, to supplement INS data in the event that GPS fails. The team's end-to-end research approach includes theoretical analysis of SOPs in the environment, building specialized software-defined radios (SDRs) that will extract relevant timing and positioning information from SOPs, developing practical navigation algorithms, and finally testing the system on ground vehicles and unmanned drones.

Asserting that autonomous vehicles will __play a pivotal role in a socio-cultural revolution, Kassas said that their ultimate goal is to make the autonomous vehicles function with no human-in-the loop for prolonged periods of time, which also includes performing missions like search, rescue, surveillance, mapping, farming, fire fighting, package delivery, and transportation.

This research, which is likely to cater next generation, was presented at the 2016 Institute of Navigation Global Navigation Satellite System Conference (ION GNSS+) in Portland, Oregon. So let’s wait and watch how this latest research will transform the face of the current space-based Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS).

(Image: Thinkstock)