The research group DARPA developed GPS, a global positioning system once exclusively used by the US Army and now a part of almost all mobile devices. Under pressure from the Europe, India, and China, Army is now looking to replace the good, old GPS.
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The US army is working to limit its dependence on GPS by developing the next generation of navigation technology, including a small autonomous chip, said Arati Prabhakar, the director of the Pentagon's research agency DARPA.
"In the 1980s, when GPS satellites started to become widely deployed... it meant carrying an enormous box around on your vehicle. Now it's got to the point where it's embedded not just in all our platforms but in many of our weapons. Sometimes a capability is so powerful that our reliance on it, in itself, becomes a vulnerability," said Ms. Prabhakar.
Global Positioning System (GPS) is using a system of satellites in Earth's orbit to calculate the position of the receiver. The mature system today has three disadvantages: it is available to use by civilians, its signal can be scrambled and it doesn't work where there's no satellite signal, such as underwater.
For the last three year DARPA is working on a new positioning technology and while the project started with the question how to eliminate satellite problems, the project is evolved in something bigger. To prevent the possibility tied to satellite use, enigneers created a new system that works without satellites to determine position, time and direction. All those functions as all contained in a eight-cubic-millimeter chip.
The chip containts three gyroscopes, three accelerometers and an atomic clock, which work as a standalone autonomous navigation system. DARPA will use that system to replace GPS in some devices, especially in small-caliber ammunition or for monitoring suspicious people.
Another approach aime to suse existing signals, such as those generated by telephone towers to replace GPS. Ms. Prabhakar describes that there "will not be a monolithic new solution, it will be a series of technologies to track and fix time and position from external sources."
European Union also started its version of GPS system, the project Galileo. The system is being built by the European Union (EU) and European Space Agency (ESA), with the goal of providing a high-precision positioning system upon which European nations can rely, independently from the Russian GLONASS, US GPS, and Chinese Compass systems (Compass is a western name for the second generation of BeiDou).
China also has its own syste: BeiDou, a competitor to GPS system and European Galileo, is expected to achieve global coverage by around 2020.
The BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS), its second generation known in the West as Compass, operates at the testing level since 2000 and it will be able to provide accurate positioning using 35 satellites cruising the Earth. The first BeiDou system, also known as the BeiDou Satellite Navigation Experimental System or BeiDou-1, now consists of three satellites with limited coverage.
Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) confirmed that India will be rolling out the first in its series of navigational satellites, the Gagan system, in 2014. ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) is the name behind the idea of dveloping a navigation service that should provide more precise navigation than GPS. ■
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