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

这个PFI: AIR技术翻译项目解决了昂贵的、测量级的户外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。该技术基于一种新颖的基于gps的方法，将工业级方法的精度与现成的消费级组件的低成本结合在一起。目前的竞争解决方案（RTK， D-GPS等）受到高成本，技术复杂性和其他限制的影响，使它们无法进入潜在用户的大部分市场。缺乏价格合理且准确的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用性，这些市场本来倾向于使用这些解决方案，包括运动追踪、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强大且可扩展的原型，在可行的消费级价格范围内提供接近专业级定位的精度。这将使该领域的进一步创新成为可能，并可能导致由于当前技术水平的限制而尚未设想的新应用领域。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)开发一种新的方法，在没有固定校准阶段的情况下结合惯性和GPS测量，2)使该技术在具有挑战性的GPS环境（如密集的城市地区和森林）中保持稳健，以及3)通过将算法集成到可扩展的云平台中，设计一种新的“定位即服务”方法。利用潜在的低成本基站众包网络，提高稳健性和准确性。其中一些贡献本身是新颖的研究领域，有些是基于已知的技术，但由于贡献作为一个整体与基于gps的基本本地化研究之间的相互作用，每个贡献都成为可能。克服这些技术障碍并将其集成到基于云的平台中，结果将是一个易于使用，低复杂性的本地化服务，可以以现有商业解决方案的一小部分成本提供专业级的准确性。除了生产工业级原型外，参与该项目的团队成员，包括一名博士后研究员和一名研究生，将获得宝贵的创业和学术到行业的技术翻译经验，不仅通过与潜在客户的持续互动，还通过在商业和法律领域导航，授权范德比尔特大学现有的知识产权。与希望将此产品集成到自己的产品中的企业建立战略合作伙伴关系，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.