Inside the race to find GPS alternatives

“For this shorter distance, we will put signals that will be a hundred times stronger than GPS signal,” says Tyler Reed, chief technology and founder at Xona. “This means that access to interference will be much smaller against our system, but we will also be able to access internal sites, and penetrate multiple walls.”

Satnav for the twenty -first century

The first GPS system began live in 1993. In decades since then, it has become one of the foundational technologies on which the world depends. The microscopic signals in the location, mobility and timing (PNT) is published by the satellites on which it is much more than Google Maps in your phone. They direct the drilling heads on oil platforms abroad, the financial transactions of time, and help synchronize energy networks around the world.

But despite the indispensable nature of the system, the GPS signal is easily suppressed or disabled by everything from space weather to 5G cell towers to the jamming the size of the phone worth a few dozen dollars. The problem has been involved among experts for years, but it has already become at the forefront in the past three years, because Russia has invaded Ukraine. The mutation in the drone warfare that described the war also sparked a race to develop technology to thwart drone attacks by disturbing the GPS signals they need to move – or intimidate signal, and create convincing but fake positioning data.

The decisive problem is the distance: the GPS constellation, which consists of 24 satellites as well as a handful of spare parts, revolves around 12,550 miles (20200 km) above the ground, in an area known as the anchor of the medium Earth. By the time their signals reach the ground receptions, they are so faded that they can be easily overcome by jamming.

Other global satellite regimen, such as Galileo in Europe, Russia Glonass, and Beidou in China, have similar structures and face the same problems.

But when Reed and founder Brian Manning established Space Space Systems in 2019, they did not think about jamming and deception. Their goal was to make the independent leadership ready for peak time.

Dozens of Uber and Waymo Robocars have already sailed American highways at the time, equipped with expensive wings of sensors such as high -resolution and Lidar cameras. Engineers have calculated that the satellite navigation system is more accurately can reduce the need for these sensors, which makes it possible to create a safe self -cost vehicle enough to go to the prevailing. One day, cars may be able to share websites with each other, says Red. But they knew that GPS was not anywhere close enough to keep self -driving cars inside the corridors and away from other things on the road. This is particularly true in intense urban environments that provide many opportunities for signs to wear walls, and create errors.

“GPS has the superpower for being a system everywhere that works the same place in the world,” says Reid. “But it is a system designed primarily to support military tasks, actually to enable them to drop five bombs in the same bowl. But this accuracy at the meter level is not enough to direct machines as they need to go and share this material space with humans safely.”