The Evolution of Positioning Systems

Republished Episode - I wanted to resurface this episode because positioning is everything, and it's a great overview of how it works.

Right now you are being bathed in radio signals from about 35 satellites, each one 20,000 km away, and every one of them is weaker than the noise floor of the receiver trying to hear it. That is GNSS, and it is the only technology on Earth that can tell you where you are in an absolute sense.

Sandy Kennedy runs applied research for autonomy and positioning at Hexagon. In this conversation she walks through how satellite positioning actually works, why centimetre accuracy is so hard to get, and what the next generation of positioning looks like. We cover low earth orbit constellations, visual positioning, Wi-Fi, 5G and ultra wideband, and the one thing every one of those systems still quietly borrows from GPS.

If you have ever wondered whether visual positioning is going to replace GNSS, or why nobody has just put GPS satellites in low earth orbit already, this one is for you.

Show notes

Sandy Kennedy is the Vice President of Innovation for Autonomy and Positioning at Hexagon. Her group does applied research: finding better ways to do what Hexagon's positioning products already do, and finding new things they could do in the future.

This episode is a tour of positioning from the top down. We start 20,000 km up with the GNSS constellations, look at what a low earth orbit constellation would change, then come back down to Earth for visual positioning, Wi-Fi, 5G, ultra wideband and the private networks used in mines and warehouses. The through line is that none of these technologies replaces the others. They each have environments where they are strong and environments where they fall over, and the real work ahead is making them hand off to each other seamlessly.

What "better positioning" actually means Sandy's old grad supervisor used to ask "better in which parameter?" Better depends on the job. For positioning it usually comes down to availability (how often you can get a fix), whether that fix is accurate enough to be useful, and then accessibility: can the receiver be made small enough, cheap enough and cool enough to go where it is needed. Power is not just power, it is also heat.

How GNSS works Every constellation (GPS, Galileo, BeiDou, GLONASS) is a state-owned, state-operated set of synchronised satellites in medium earth orbit. Your receiver measures the time a signal took to arrive, multiplies by the speed of light, and gets a distance. Four satellites give you four unknowns: X, Y, Z and your clock offset from system time. More satellites give you redundancy, and in this case redundancy is a good thing. In open sky today a receiver can see about 35 satellites at once, each broadcasting on around three frequencies.

Why centimetre accuracy is hard - The signal is below the noise floor of your receiver. There nto. You have to fish it out. - Broadcast orbits are only accurate to metres. That is remarkable for something 20,000 km away, but if you want centimetres you need precise orbits from a correction service. - The troposphere delays the signal and changes with water vapour. The ionosphere is dispersive and tears code and carrier apart, and it follows the solar cycle. Multi-frequency receivers can observe and remove mostally. - Multipath. In a prairie there is nothing to bounce off. Over water there is more. In a city you are surrounded by hard metal and stone, and the receiver has to work out which arrival was the direct line of sight.

Why not just put GNSS satellites in low earth orbit? Daniel pitches it as a startup idea and Sandy takes it apart, fairly. LEO is cheaper to launch to, satellites need less radiation hardening, the signal arrives stronger and cuts through foliage better (not buildingte slices through the atmosphere in a way that helps separateorbital, atmospheric and multipath errors quickly. LEO satellites can also position themselves using the existing GNSS constellations above them. The catch: a LEO pass is about 10 minutes horizon to horizon versuorbits are more disturbed by gravity variations and solaractivity, and if you want to broadcast inside the protected L-band there is a very large amount of spectrum paperwork ahead of you. Going to a higher band gives smaller antennas and jamming resilience but brings back te TV owners know well.

Would we design GNSS differently today? Sandy is careful here. There were good reasons for MEO, for L-band and for the signal structure. The one thing newer constellations like Galileo are adding is authentication. GPS is a one-way broadcast with an o means unlimited passive users who never reveal themselves tothe system, and also an easy target for spoofing and jamming. Two-way systems like 5G can authenticate, but at the cost of a user limit and the user having to identify themselves to the network.

Visual positioning versus GNSS Daniel raises the LinkedIn claims that visual positioning is "killing GPS". Sandy's answer: visual positioning is how humans navigate, and it is excellent at the immediate surroundings, which is exactly the dense urba But it has to be tied to a database of known coordinates tomean anything in an absolute sense, it is useless in the middle of the ocean, and it still needs a master clock, which almost always comes from GNSS. Her framing: GNSS gives you a coordinate, visual positioning givesordinate does not mean you are not lost.

Terrestrial positioning Wi-Fi is good enough to get you to the right city block or building, but decentralised access points with unverified coordinates make it neither precise nor secure. 5G can do angle of arrival, which turns positionin problem instead of a resection, but the solution is computedat the network operator, not on your device, and only for members of the network. Ultra wideband and GNSS-like ground transmitters work well in warehouses and mines but they are proprietary, someone has to install andsation always lags the first proprietary wave.

The future Not one breakthrough technology, but seamless combination. A logistics vehicle that moves from the truck into the warehouse and back out again is still hard to position across that boundary. Centimetre positioning rticularly small last-mile and warehouse robots that sharespace with people. Sandy also points out an inversion: reality capture treats moving objects as noise, while navigation treats them as the most important thing in the scene.

Why positioning gets overlooked Position is the given quantity in every physics problem, so nobody thinks about it until it is missing. Computer vision is intuitive because it emulates what Sandy calls our "meat circuits and eyeballs". GNSS and innd estimation, but they are computationally light, need notraining data, and offer a capability humans do not have. And the thing that most surprises Sandy compared with ten years ago is that space is now a legitimate topic. It is not just Star Trek anymore.

Connect with Sandy on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandy-kennedy-569a6a4/

Related episodes SBAS, a base station in the sky https://mapscaping.com/podcast/satellite-based-augmentation-system-a-base-station-in-the-sky/

Navigating the past, present and future of GNSS https://mapscaping.com/podcast/navigating-the-past-present-and

Where does Google's blue dot come from? https://mapscaping.com/podcast/how-google-calculates-your-location/

Alternate short description, if you prefer a question-led hook

Is visual positioning going to kill GPS? Why hasn't anyone just put GNSS satellites in low earth orbit? And why does every "GPS alternative" still need GPS for its clock?