Localization Challenges for In-Vehicle GPS - How Many GPS recievers will be enough?
Today’s post is a bit on the high tech side, but you may want to wade through a little of it, just in case you have any interest in where all this GPS, GPRS, Internet, VoIP, Blue Tooth and heaven knows what other technologies are coming along.
Today it’s not uncommon at all for a car to have a GPS receiver. Also not uncommon for a driver to be carrying either a free-standing GPS receiver or a GPS-enabled phone or PDA.
In the commercial world, many trucks may already have more than one GPS receiver on board. So the question that springs to mind right away is … who’s keeping track of all this technology .. or who, aside from the consumer who often doesn’t even know what he or she actually needs … is going to call a halt to the proliferation and come up with a plan that establishes how much is enough and not too little and not too much.
Nikkei Electronics Asia in their February issue have a nice run down on this problem. Basically, what we need sooner, rather than later, is for vehicle manufacturers to put a single, decent GPS receiver on board and make the signals from that “black box” available to any other box on the vehicle who needs to use it via a specific vehicle data bus. It’s becoming cost effective to even multiplex signals on databases to turn school bus warning lights on an off, so carrying GPS location data around the vehicle makes even more cents and, done right, will even save cents.