Tuesday, August 21, 2012

The GPS tracker to beat (smallest, lightest, and most durable)

Figure 0: Please read below.
From the very early days of GPS snapshot technology has been proposed as a way of reducing power consumption and footprint of a radio positioning device. Some papers about NASA microGPS date back to late ‘90ies:

Later on many Companies tried to patent this technology and bring it to the market. Most of them have been acquired or have merged - see the latest acquisition of CSR “mobile business” (whatever that means!) from Samsung.
To our knowledge until today all development efforts led to products with disputable market readiness, if otherwise mostly devoted to picture geo-tagging.
Instead, the assumption that a snapshot approach could beat (from the cost and power consumption point of view) a hardware baseband has always been contradicted by Moore’s law and market demand. Lead manufacturers now release complete GPS engines on a chip smaller than what was before the RF Front-End part only. Compare e.g. the CSR GSD4e (3.5 x 3.2 x 0.6mm 42-ball WLCSP) and the Skyworks SE4150L (4 x 4 x 0.9 mm 24-pin QFN). That is probably why the complexity associated to a snapshot positioning approach has never won over a slightly more expensive and power consuming standard GPS receiver.
Probably the real value of a snapshot approach has not been identified yet and in our opinion is to be searched in other domains such as geoencryption and GNSS authentication:

So we longed for a Company that would own the technological skills to provide a new standard in terms of snapshot positioning. 
Cellguide has been in the business several years now but only recently released a real hardware module – simple to use and available for sale – that works with a snapshot positioning approach and has specifications that could dramatically change the tracking business: the Robin.

We bought an evaluation kit (expensive, but breaks the ice) and we are testing it together with other 
enthusiastic engineers. 

A Robin device on its cradle (used for charging, programming, and downloading the snapshots on the PC) looks like this:

Figure 1: Robin device on its cradle
 A couple of Robin devices next to each other:

Figure 2: Two robin devices next to each other


The Robin brochure says already a lot, but I wanted to show the results of a real test (on the beach – it is summer after all).
The reference path was roughly this one:

Figure 3: Approximate reference path
The little wire antenna in the pictures above was used (which is terrible compared to a patch antenna of course). 
Please note that each snapshot is - by design - completely independent from the others.

64ms snapshots (at 1Hz) lead to the following positioning results:

Figure 4a: 64ms snapshots, raw
Figure 4b: 64ms snapshots at 1Hz, Kalman filtered
Figure 4c: 64ms snapshots at 0.2Hz, Kalman filtered
The same was test was also reproduced by taking 512ms snapshots (higher sensitivity) at 1Hz.

Figure 5a: 512ms snapshots at 1Hz, raw
Figure 5b: 512ms snapshots at 1Hz, Kalman filtered
Figure 5c: 512ms snapshots at 0.2Hz, Kalman filtered
 Results can be summarised in the following:

Figure 6a: 64ms snapshots, raw (red) and filtered (green)
Figure 6b: 512ms snapshots, raw (red) and filtered (green)
Figure 6c: filtered output for 64ms (diamonds) and 512 (circles)

Robin was born at Cellguide for wildlife tracking but as we came across it we could not help thinking it shall be employed in lots of other cases as well. The Aclys chip (earth of Robin) has a low data rate, low pin count SPI bus compatible even with simple 16bit micro-controllers. It can therefore be embedded in very small and cost effective devices to enable tracking capability where it was not possible before.
We see potential in this technique and we hope you enjoyed reading as as much as we did running the tests!

Greetings,
Michele

P.S.: For further information please contact directly the Cell-guide guys at info@cell-guide.com

11 comments:

Dan GNSS said...

Michele,

Very interesting result. Great work! I have the following questions:

1. What size of 64ms sample? Looks like 64ms has the same result of 512ms

2. Since each sample is independent, The Kalman filter is the average of the sample at time interval?

3. Which software are you used get the result?

Thanks
Dan

Michele said...

Hi Dan,

1) I think roughly 16KBytes. When you have good sky visibility it's normal that the position does not change much with sensitivity.

2) Not at all. Each sample is independent in the sense that each fix is not made by assuming something about the previous ones. The Kalman filter is absolutely not an average.

3) Software is provided by Cellguide. A licence is generally included with each Aclys chip, but sources are closed (of course!)

Cheers,
Michele

Dan GNSS said...

Michele,

Thank you for your replay.

This type of technology has been there for years. Compare with PRIMO + RETROFIX, What's the difference? Is there a significant improvement?

Dan

Michele said...

Hi Dan,

It's that you picked up the point that this technology has been there for years.. I am glad I taught you something :)

If you see no difference between PRIMO+Retrofix and this I cannot help you more that inviting you to read again my post... it is all about market suitability and appeal.

One thing I did not mention is the price break of Aclys + the relevant software licence for snapshot positioning, which is extremely interesting and suitable for mass deployment. But this is no "commercial" website: there are just technical pages.

All the best,
Michele

Shravan said...

Hi Michele,

Firstly I would like to know the purpose of the eval kit.Since you have mentioned that the eval kit is expensive is there any way I can talk to the module by building an eval kit of my own.Also what is the approx price difference in buying the module alone or the eval kit.

Secondly ,is the software available only with the evaluation kit? or can we get it separately with the robin modules.

Michele said...

Hi Shravan,

I am not in the position to talk about prices: I don't work for Cell-Guide!

1)
The purpose of the eval kit (2xRobin + cradle) is to demostrate that with a simple 16bit microcontroller and a bit of flash you can record snapshots and post-process them resulting in the lowest power consumption solution possible.

With the eval kit I also bought a reel of ICs to evaluate them on my personal evaluation kit (under development - the latest version of SvoTracker). I think there is about two orders of magnitude between the eval kit (less than 3K$) and the chips in volume qty (less than 3$) but again you need to refer to the manufacturer for a quote.

2)
No, a software licence comes included in the price of each Aclys chip! Needless to say, you need to be talking volumes to be accounted as a sensible customer to Cell-Guide.

Does this answer your questions?

All the best,
Michele

Shravan said...

Hello Michele,

Thanks for the reply.I have contacted Cell guide for the other details.

Meanwhile I checked the SvoTracker module .It does the same thing as what the robin module does right?..Is this product available in the market or on sale??

Unknown said...

Really cool to see a break down of this technology, I have been so happy with my GPS car tracker but I never knew the full force of technology behind it before

Hassen said...

Hello Michele,

The results are Very interesting and good job! I have questions though

1. What do the red points represent WHICH YOU CALLED THEM THE RAW? How did you get that information i thought we only get the filterd navigation solution from the receivers.

2.Or did you employed an external kaman filter after the receiver output. (For the green ones)

In short is it possible to take GNSS reciver navigation solutions with and with out kaman filter?

Hassen said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
emreaksu said...

I do believe all the ideas you have presented for your post. They’re very convincing and can definitely work. Still, the posts are very quick for novices. Could you please lengthen them a little from next time? Thank you for the post. i will try to write some topic but little different, "small gps tracker"