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Comment by chii | Hacker News Reader

is there any reason to be even more accurate than a 5 meter radius? I mean, if you are targeting a person in a building, i can't see why it has to be more accurate than that. Navigation of a drone that is less than 5 meters in size may require higher accuracy, i suppose...

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The chip doesn't just improve maximum accuracy, it also vastly reduces the deviation when in poor conditions such as inside a building. The technique to do so just happens to also make peak operating conditions more accurate.

Self-driving vehicles. You can buy GPS-based automatic steering systems for tractors right now [1] (there's still an operator on board, so it's not truly autonomous)

Obviously the self-driving cars of the future will also need other sensors as GPS doesn't work under tunnels and bridges.

[1] https://agriculture.trimble.com/precision-ag/products/steeri...

That's precisely the problem TomTom and Here HD Maps aim to solve.

Airplanes are already using the higher-accuracy GPS+GNSS to land safely on the runway in low-visibility conditions, guided in by the Flight Management Computer. It makes a big difference whether the plane is 5 meters above the runway or zero meters above the runway.

Commercial airliners use a radar altimeter, not GPS/GNSS to assess altitude.

Most if not all airliners equipped with autoland systems use ILS rather than GPS for position as well.

Agreed, but only the big iron. I spent 8 years working for Universal Avionics, who develops precision WAAS-SBAS GPS flight management systems for GA / BizJets: http://uasc.com/home/nextgentechnologies/precisionaviationwi...

A problem that I usually have with Google Maps is that, when I am driving in (or next to) an elevated highway, the GPS usually does not know if I am in the highway or in the road beneath it.

Knowing the lane of the highway you are may be useful as well.

Determining lanes for map navigation is a big problem. I had a buddy that was responsible for mass export of Verizon telemetry data from Verizon to a third company. Their "holy grail" was to be able to determine lanes through triangulation in a timely manner (2008-2009ish). Don't know if the problem ever got solved and it would have only been relevant in dense metropolitan areas.

Imagine pedestrian navigation. 5 meters (a rare, perfect accuracy) would place you in the center of a street instead of the sidewalk.

5 meters is the difference between one room and the next room. Huge potential for indoor navigation and contextual AR applications.

Mapping the boundaries of a property is usually desired to much higher precision than 5 meters!

Autonomous vehicles and drones (used for delivery) can benefit a lot from such accuracy.

Wow really? You would post that on a technology board?

Yesterday I read an idea from a guy who wanted to create a mariokart-style "ghost" via AR to pace you while you are on a run. That's one example.

Guess I'm being downvoted for snark. But the definition of technology is to advance the state of the art. None of us would be here if we thought everything was already good enough.

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