I-Corps: A Community-Driven Precision GPS Service

当前精密定位解决方案的高成本和技术复杂性使它们无法进入原本倾向于使用此类解决方案的大型细分市场。这些潜在市场应用的一些例子包括跟踪极限运动活动、精准农业、智能交通、无人驾驶车辆的导航，如无人机、机器人、个人无人机，以及用于学术界和政府机构的传感器数据收集，甚至是自己动手的土地测量。由于预算限制，这些市场的客户目前必须适应可用的精度降低的情况，否则他们必须为定制硬件解决方案支付高昂的价格。该提议将弥合成本和准确性之间的差距，并抓住独立开发者和小型企业的市场份额，这些企业要么没有时间，资源，要么没有钱花在现有的解决方案上。该团队提出构建精准绝对定位服务。提出的创新引入了一个已知位置的固定接收器网络，这样相对于这些固定节点中的任何一个的位置将产生绝对大地坐标空间中的坐标。此外，该团队建议在基于云的基础设施中执行定位过程，这将能够执行更复杂的计算操作，并融合多个传感器的数据，以进一步提高系统的准确性。我们相信这个永远在线、随时待命的基于云的定位平台将很好地抽象出目前需要精确定位信息的开发人员所面临的大多数主要问题。所建议的系统所达到的精度水平对于许多应用程序来说已经足够了，尽管所建议的解决方案目前依赖于相对定位结果，但在众所周知的位置放置一些接收器将为可以在云中运行的绝对定位服务打开大门。

The high cost and technical complexity of current precision positioning solutions make them inaccessible to a large market segment that would be otherwise inclined to use such solutions. Some examples of these potential market applications include the tracking of extreme sport activities, precision agriculture, intelligent transportation, navigation of unmanned vehicles, such as UAVs, robots, personal drones,as well as sensor data collection for use in academia and by government agencies, or even do-it-yourself land surveying. Customers in these markets must currently make do with the decreased accuracies available to them given their budgetary constraints, or they must pay exorbitant prices for custom hardware solutions. The proposed will bridge the gap between cost and accuracy and capture the market share of independent developers and small businesses that either do not have the time, the resources, or the money to spend on existing solutions.This team proposes to build a precision absolute positioning service. The proposed innovation introduces a network of stationary receivers at known locations, such that the position relative to any one of these stationary nodes will result in coordinates in an absolute geodetic coordinate space. Additionally, this team proposes to carry out the localization procedure in a cloud-based infrastructure which will enable performing much more computationally complex operations as well as fuse data across multiple sensors to increase the accuracy of the system even further. We believe this always-on, always-ready cloud-based positioning platform will nicely abstract away most of the major problems that developers needing precision location information currently face. The levels of accuracy achievable by the proposed system are sufficient for many applications, and although the proposed solution currently relies on relative localization results, the placement of a few receivers at well-known locations would open the door for an absolute localization service that could run in the cloud.