toward-hyperlocation-for-everyone

"Precise agriculture" makes possible new levels of efficiency in farming, with better controlled practices and lower ecological impact. Current technologies are proprietary solutions that are expensive and complex, so very few farmers can afford their deployment. We propose the HyperLocation architecture and prototype, completely designed at ISAC2015, as an affordable solution based on on-the-shelf components.

This project is solving the Sensor Yourself challenge.
Description
<< Fore more exciting applications with precise positioning system>>

https://youtu.be/5H0Y0b2fRu0

Positioning and navigation features are now pervasive in everyday devices, and an essential technology for precise agriculture or auto-pilot driving. Common implementations provide a 10 meters (30 foot) precision for civilians, but some techniques such as RTK-GNSS and PPP allow up to 2 centimeters (1 inch) precision. The precise positioning system has potential to develop applications for people life.

These techniques require appropriate antenna and chips to compute positions, and this has today a staggering cost about US$8000, so it is difficult to expect wide spread. High-precision positioning and navigation need innovation to cut these costs.

This project aims at building low-cost RTK-GNSS integrations for everyone to use. At ISAC 2015, we have developed a first working prototype, as an external hardware extension usable from a smartphone application. This prototype provides a simple and low-cost RTK-GNSS positioning solution that shows it is possible to have wide spread usage.

We expect to provide high-precision positioning directly into smartphones. The problem today is that smartphone operating systems and positioning chips do not provide APIs to access the data necessary for computing positions from GNSS signals. So our prototype consists of an external module that provides the necessary readings and RTK computations.

We have used a U-Blox 8 module to access GNSS readings, and a RaspberryPi module to compute the RTK signal with the open source RTKLIB library. The RaspberryPi module uses an extra WiFi interface to collect correction data from a base station---as part of the RTK method---and to provide positioning results to the user device. We chose WiFi for communication with the user to support common mobile devices such as smartphone and tablets.

We plan to continue working on the prototype to include the PPP method as well, use cheaper and smaller modules, and ultimately provide a better integration with smartphones and other mobile devices. We hope to see soon applications and smartphones taking advantage of high-precision positioning, as well as advances in chips for seamless integrations.

--------Reference-----------

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/reach-first-affordable-rtk-gps-receiver

Project Information

License: BSD 2-Clause "Simplified" or "FreeBSD" License (BSD-2-Clause)

Source Code/Project URL: https://github.com/ISAC-Tokyo/HyperLocation

Resources

Demo Site - Hyper Location Web Client - http://tokyo.spaceappschallenge.org/HyperLocation/

Team