One of StarLink's biggest overlooked opportunities I think is radically re-engineering a GPS like system that can work indoors and outdoors as well as offering some pose estimation capability. It would make implementing robots way easier.
One of StarLink's biggest overlooked opportunities I think is radically re-engineering a GPS like system that can work indoors and outdoors as well as offering some pose estimation capability. It would make implementing robots way easier.
Edited: 18 parts complete of a planned 100 part series but each segment is only a few minutes long.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1Fyn_h6LKU&list=PLGvhNIiu1u...
A few of the longest ones are only 26 minutes, and some are less than 10, so it's actually bad as all that.
I'll update my original and check out the Stanford course as well.
We didn't work on the radio level (other than learning about the 2-frequency ionosphere delay measurement as a calculation input), but did the rest of the stack above that including working out programs to derive position from given data input. I was a civil engineer but I think it's a great cross-discipline subject for a lot of fields.
I've seen some multi channel GPS front ends like this one: https://www.crowdsupply.com/amungo-navigation/nut2nt-plus
With 3 or 4 channels you could use the GPS almanac to get satellite direction and your heading. Though you could do it with two if you could get two antennas a couple of feet apart. But smaller robots don't have that kind of room.
Right now I think the biggest pain point with GPS is that if I want single redundancy GPS with 2 CM precision and true heading I need a whole bunch of stuff. 2x 200$ GPS receivers (ublox f9p) on my robot. 1x 200$ receiver with a decent antenna and a xbee radio to act as a RTK base station. And this was just for a simple outdoor rover. And the base station always had to go in the same place because you have to do everything relative to the base station. Then you need all the software to coordinate all that and manage everything.
I want 1 receiver unit, global absolute position within 2 CM with a true heading. Additionally, I want seamless transitioning/augmentation with a global network of terrestrial beacons for interiors and areas with poor surface coverage. And I want all that in a 100$ish module and some sort of subscription.
See, for example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5464685/
One stop gap solution I has was just an IR beacon on my GPS base station. I got an initial alignment with the rover camera and my two gps points. But ended up adding a second gps to the rover.