just read this on France24. there is a picture included in the article.
please excuse me for actually doing a copy and paste of the article instead of a link.
25 April 2013 - 10H50
US army seeks new technology to replace GPS
US Air Force Captain Tyler Rennell (3rd right) explaining to Afghan pilots how to use a GPS instrument at the Kandahar military airbase on October 11, 2009. The US army is working to limit its dependence on GPS by developing the next generation of navigation technology, including a tiny autonomous chip, the director of the Pentagon's research agency said. AFP - The US army is working to limit its dependence on GPS by developing the next generation of navigation technology, including a tiny autonomous chip, the director of the Pentagon's research agency said Wednesday.
DARPA, the research group behind a range of spy tech and which helped invent the Internet, was also the driving force behind the creation of the Global Positioning System, director Arati Prabhakar said at a press conference.
"In the 1980s, when GPS satellites started to become widely deployed... it meant carrying an enormous box around on your vehicle," she said.
"Now it's got to the point where it's embedded not just in all our platforms but in many of our weapons," as well as in many civilian devices, she said.
But "sometimes a capability is so powerful that our reliance on it, in itself, becomes a vulnerability," she added.
"I think that's where we are today with GPS."
Among the fears: the GPS signal could be scrambled by an adversary, as happened recently in South Korea.
Starting in 2010, DARPA has been working on a variety of programs aimed at developing new navigation and positioning technology -- at first with the goal of extending their reach to places where satellites don't work, such as underwater.
But now, amid fears of over-reliance on -- and possible vulnerabilities with -- global positioning satellites, experts are looking to create not just a companion, but an alternative to GPS.
To that end, researchers at DARPA and the University of Michigan have created a new system that works without satellites to determine position, time and direction, all contained within a eight-cubic-millimeter chip.
The tiny chip holds three gyroscopes, three accelerometers and an atomic clock, which, together, work as an autonomous navigation system.
DARPA envisages using this technology to replace GPS in some contexts, especially in small-caliber ammunition or for monitoring people.
Another approach would use existing signals, such as those generated by broadcast antennas, radios, telephone towers and even lightning to temporarily replace GPS.
Prabhakar emphasized there "will not be a monolithic new solution, it will be a series of technologies to track and fix time and position from external sources."
this was posted about 2 weeks ago with some good comments.
[msg]202263[/msg]
I guess you can not call it 'black box' technology anymore.
>sometimes a capability is so powerful that our reliance on it, in itself, becomes a vulnerability
I find it very encouraging that someone in power is thinking this way.
I read about the improvisation that our do-what-needs-to-be-done forces did in WW II and then hear how you can't even get a modern military airplane off the ground without encrypted mission data packages put together in some headquarters and communicated around the world in a timely manner, and relying on GPS to know where to go. That scares me. So much dependent on Mr. Murphy looking the other way, and little ability to improvise.
Likewise, all the problems reported in tests of the LightSquared scheme, where E911 and other unrelated systems were disrupted because of reliance on GPS timing. It's not just LS, but what if something else disrupted the GPS network? So many things would break.
On the other hand, I don't see that inertial navigation chips are going to be a great solution. All inertial systems drift. The best inertial we have don't hold survey precision, or even bombing precision, for any longer than just adequate for their use. I don't see a chip having as low drift as the best current systems.
Fiber-optic gyroscopes made in France for about $500K still precess and they have zero moving parts.
