Where to next for GPS?

Not so many years ago, the demise of the standalone GPS was hailed as inevitable. Not so, it turns out, but where is it headed next?

One of the downsides of living in the digital age is our tendency to insist that development of a new technology heralds an inevitable end for its predecessor. While disruptive innovation is very real and in many cases has dramatically changed the landscape, there are just as many scenarios where reality just doesn’t meet up with the hype.

I blame the music industry. It’s been 16 years since the peer-to-peer internet file sharing service Napster effectively brought the world’s major music labels to their collective knees. A decade and a half on, squillions of dollars in legal fees spent (that probably would have been better directed towards developing a new business model) and it is still relatively easy to get your hands on copyrighted material completely free of charge. Ethical issues of illegal downloading aside, the impact this had on the traditional music distribution business was huge. Other industries looked on with a combination of interest and fear - if a company the size of Sony didn’t see it coming, then no-one was safe from a shake-up arising from potentially game-changing developments. And so it is that we now panic whenever a faster, cheaper or more accessible version of any technology arrives.

Recent reports suggest that sales of e-readers are in decline, after all that frothing about the death of print. Sure, newspaper sales are dramatically dropping - online is the most logical way to access news - but did it really spell the end of traditional paper books? If so, why aren’t e-reader sales on the rise? Maybe we just aren’t reading any more.

We heard it a few years back when navigation functionality became a standard offering on smartphones. Take it from someone who has been lost in the backstreets of an unfamiliar city holding an overheated iPhone to the air-conditioning vent in an effort to reduce the temperature enough to resume functioning; there’s a lot to be said for using a standalone fit-for-purpose device. Your average pocket multitool will suffice at a pinch, but how many tradies and technicians operate with that one tool alone? I’ll tell you how many ... exactly none.

But, every product has a life cycle and a path of change is inevitable, so let’s look at some developments that might direct future navigational offerings.

Developments in camera-based GPS

Researchers from the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision (ACRV) at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) have been working towards a world-first camera-based GPS system which will work in any weather or terrain.

Dr Michael Milford is a chief investigator at ACRV. He says that the camera-based system is better than the current technology because it doesn’t rely on satellites and it works day and night and in extreme conditions such as storms.

“Current satellite-based systems don’t work at all underground in tunnels and often drop out in city areas around tall buildings,” he said. “Camera-based GPS offers the potential to leverage extremely cheap mass-produced cameras rather than more existing lasers used on many platforms.”

PhD student on the project Edward Pepperell explains how the system was used to ‘fingerprint’ locations in South East Queensland, where trials were conducted: “Using a new multiscale image comparison technique, video images of a roadway are stored and then converted to contrast patterns. The camera-based GPS then matches up the location based on the sequences stored in its memory.”

Dr Milford says that the system is also capable of using street imagery databases, such as Google Street View, and other online images from road networks.

“A potential avenue for future work would be to leverage 3D construction or scene understanding techniques and the new research enables the navigation system to recognise the same stretch of road, whether it’s travelling along the same lane as the database images or four lanes over on the opposite side of a median strip.”

Chemical computing

Late last year we reported on the development of a chemical alternative to GPS, as conducted by researchers at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa). The team developed a chemical ‘processor’ that reliably detected the fastest way through a city maze. The process takes advantage of the laws of physical chemistry and practices what is called ‘chemical computing’. A gel mixed with acid is applied to the exit of a labyrinth (the destination), while the rest of the maze is filled with an alkaline liquid. While the acid spreads through the alkaline maze, the majority of it remains with the gel at the exit point. An alkaline solution mixed with dye is then added to the other end of the maze (the entrance) and it then automatically seeks the way to the exit, or the point with the highest acidity level.

Rita Tóth, from Empa’s Laboratory for High Performance Ceramics, explains the benefit of this process: “The advantage of this chemical computer over its electronic counterpart is that it finds all the possible routes virtually in parallel. A normal computer calculates step by step one possibility after another, which takes longer.” Basically, traditional satnav systems demand a tremendous amount of computational power to achieve the same goal.

The great indoors ... the final frontier

Admittedly, this one’s been on the horizon for a while now - IT and technology news sites such as BizTech and Tech Radar have been heralding the impending emergence of indoor GPS systems since mid-2013. Seemingly more suited to customer engagement applications (think shopping malls, airports and sporting arenas), accurate, inexpensive indoor navigation is the final frontier and proponents claim it spells good things for tech companies in terms of opportunity. As current GPS technology is not reliable in indoor applications, the development of a successful alternative form could seriously impact on existing navigational technology ... did someone say disruptive innovation?

Regardless of where it goes from here - cameras, chemistry or something that hasn’t even been thought of yet - it’s always worthwhile remembering that technology cycles move at different paces. Today’s ‘next big thing’ doesn’t always make it and just because they say ‘the end is nigh’, it doesn’t necessarily mean it is ... well, not yet anyway.

Image credit: © georgejmclittle/Dollar Photo Club