PFI:AIR - TT: High-precision, low-cost GPS cloud service

这个PFI：AIR技术转换项目解决了昂贵的测量级室外GPS定位技术与低成本、低精度的技术(如智能手机中的技术)之间的空白。这项技术基于一种基于GPS的新方法，它将工业级方法的精确度与现成的消费级组件的低成本结合在一起。当前的竞争解决方案(RTK、D-GPS等)受制于高成本、技术复杂性和其他限制，使其无法进入大量潜在用户的市场。缺乏负担得起的准确解决方案限制了公司和开发商在位置感知市场上进一步创新和提供更好产品的可能性，否则这些公司和开发商将倾向于使用此类解决方案，包括运动跟踪、自动驾驶汽车、无人机和DIY土地测量等应用。该项目的成功完成将产生一个坚固和可扩展的原型，在可行的消费级价格范围内提供接近专业级定位的精度。该项目在将研究发现转化为商业应用的过程中解决了许多已知的技术差距，包括1)开发了一种用于组合惯性和GPS测量而无需固定校准阶段的新方法，2)使该技术在诸如密集的城市区域和森林等具有挑战性的GPS环境中具有健壮性，以及3)通过将算法集成在可扩展的云平台中来设计一种新的方法来实现“定位即服务”，利用一个潜在的众包网络的低成本基站，以提高稳健性和准确性。其中一些贡献本身是新的研究领域，一些是基于已知技术，但每一项贡献都是由于作为一个整体的贡献与本翻译项目所基于的基于GPS的基本本地化研究之间的相互作用而成为可能的。克服这些技术障碍并将其集成到基于云的平台中的结果将是一个易于使用、低复杂性的本地化服务，它可以以现有商业解决方案的一小部分成本提供专业级的精度。除了生产工业级原型之外，参与该项目的团队成员，包括一名博士后研究人员和一名研究生，将获得宝贵的创业和学术界到行业技术翻译经验，不仅通过与潜在客户的持续互动，还通过导航从范德比尔特大学授权现有知识产权的商业和法律环境，与希望将该产品整合到自己的产品中的企业发展战略合作伙伴关系，并学习如何最好地利用来自学术界和工业界的可用资源。

This PFI: AIR Technology Translation project addresses the void between expensive, survey-grade outdoor GPS-based localization technologies and low-cost, lower-accuracy techniques, such as the ones found in smartphones. The technology is based upon a novel GPS-based methodology that marries the precision found in industrial-grade methodologies with the low costs of off-the-shelf consumer-grade components. Current competing solutions (RTK, D-GPS, etc.) suffer from high cost, technical complexity, and other constraints, making them inaccessible to a large market segment of potential users. The lack of affordable and accurate solutions restricts the availability of further innovations and better product offerings by companies and developers in location-aware markets that would be otherwise inclined to use such solutions, including applications such as sports tracking, self driving cars, drones, and do-it-yourself land surveying. Successful completion of this project will result in a robust and scalable prototype, providing accuracies approaching those of professional-grade positioning in a viable consumer-grade price range. This will enable further innovation in this field, and it may lead to new application areas that have not yet been conceived due to limitations of the current state of the art.The project addresses a number of known technology gaps as it translates from research discovery toward commercial application, including 1) developing a novel approach for combining inertial and GPS measurements without a stationary calibration phase, 2) making the technology robust in challenging GPS environments such as dense urban areas and forests, and 3) devising a new approach to "Localization as a Service" by integrating the algorithms in a scalable cloud platform, utilizing a potentially crowd-sourced network of low-cost base stations for increased robustness and accuracy. Some of these contributions are novel research areas themselves and some are based on known techniques, but each one is made possible due to the interplay between the contributions as a whole and the basic GPS-based localization research upon which this translation project is built. The result of overcoming these technical hurdles and integrating them into a cloud-based platform will be an easy-to-use, low-complexity localization service that can provide professional-grade accuracies at a fraction of the cost of existing commercial solutions.In addition to producing an industrial-grade prototype, the team members involved in this project, including a postdoctoral researcher and a graduate student, will receive invaluable entrepreneurial and academia-to-industry technology translation experiences, not only through continued interactions with potential customers, but also by navigating the business and legal landscape of licensing the existing IP from Vanderbilt University, developing strategic partnerships with businesses who desire to integrate this product into their own, and learning how to best utilize the resources available, both from academia and from industry.