During the hackathon the team only did a simulated flight, not a real flight, so take the results on effectiveness with a grain of salt. In any environment with significant seasonal changes, localization based on google maps will be a lot harder.
Each 5 days, a satellite from sentinel mission take a picture of your location. It's 8 days for landsat mission. Those are publicly available data (I encourage everyone to use it for environment studies, I think any software people that care about the future should use it).
It's obviously not the same precision as the google map, and it needs update, but it's enough to take in account seasonal change and even brutal events (floods, war, fire, you name it).
Occurred to me that in a war or over the water this wouldn’t be useful. But I think it will be a useful technology (that to be fair likely already exists), in addition to highly accurate dead reckoning systems, when GPS is knocked out or unreliable, as secondary fall back navigation.
Why do you say that? Navigational techniques like this (developed and validated over longer timeframes of course) are precisely for war where you want to cause mayhem for your enemies who want to prevent you from doing that by jamming GPS.
This is not just an idea but we have already fielded systems.
> over the water this wouldn’t be useful
What is typically done with cruise missiles launched from sea that there is a wide sweep of the coast mapped where it is predicted to make landfall. How wide this zone has to be depends on the performance of the innertial guidance and the quality of the fix it is starting out with.
Seems like a really good use case for downtown anywhere, because otherwise the buildings make your gps go haywire and navigation sucks. Though I will say, and certain providers try not to admit this too loudly, a much better way to handle those downtown scenarios is to map out and keep track of the location of WiFi signals and use their relative strength as detected by your device to triangulate your position instead. Works really well in super dense areas like cities
IIRC many cruise missiles do a similar thing, except with radar and topographical maps instead of cameras and photos. Obviously the cruise missiles cost a hair more as well.
First generation Tomahawk did this (TERCOM) but later blocks acquired image matching guidance which is presumably today very advanced (I heard about it first around 1988).
The YouTube channel TheOperationRoom has a very well animated play by play (almost to the minute) of the air and ground war in gulf war 1 in Iraq/kuwait. In one of the videos he mentions tomahawks having to take a long route into Baghdad because it was the only one with enough terrain for the missile to follow to the target. This was 1991 so maybe older inventory.
The drone uses a camera mounted underneath it to position itself with imagery from Google Maps highlighting similarities in the images to get a rough estimate of the co-ordinates. Doesn’t Google Maps still require internet, you may ask?
Google Maps allows users to download segments of maps ahead of time, usually for use when you are travelling or camping out in remote areas. In this instance, the team used this feature to their advantage, allowing the drone to continue operating regardless of having a GPS satellite connection.
The entire point of such a build is to operate autonomously with local data in the presence of jamming | signal loss for other reasons.
You can download osm and satellite datasets for thousands of square miles in a few GB. If you need very high resolution satellite it's gonna be on the order of 1GB per ~10sqmi depending on what you're up to.
Not sure how they do it but I think it's quite feasible to extend a kalman filter to include camera intput referenced to an image. E.g. https://doi.org/10.3390/aerospace9090503
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It's obviously not the same precision as the google map, and it needs update, but it's enough to take in account seasonal change and even brutal events (floods, war, fire, you name it).
Why do you say that? Navigational techniques like this (developed and validated over longer timeframes of course) are precisely for war where you want to cause mayhem for your enemies who want to prevent you from doing that by jamming GPS.
This is not just an idea but we have already fielded systems.
> over the water this wouldn’t be useful
What is typically done with cruise missiles launched from sea that there is a wide sweep of the coast mapped where it is predicted to make landfall. How wide this zone has to be depends on the performance of the innertial guidance and the quality of the fix it is starting out with.
The future is scary. It is now straightforward and inexpensive for lots of folks to construct jam-resistant Shahed-style drones. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006499367697.html
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLErys4h2oiuyKCuzZhpHhCeRw...
Dead Comment
Without a GPS signal, I assume. Unless Google Maps is stored locally on their drone.