GPS is a foul, temperamental thing that harbors prejudice toward rural folks, often denying them the same level of service available to city dwellers. Other times, GPS is downright territorial, attempting to murder outsiders with faulty directions, like the time my friend’s GPS tried to steer him off a cliff somewhere in Puerto Rico. The U.S. government sympathizes these modern day plights – because they affect our military – and has decided to take matters into its own hands by way of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to develop a radical alternative to GPS with unjammable signals that won’t disappear in blind spots.
The navigation system, with its advanced positioning and navigation-tracking, is aimed at giving the armed forces a far more reliable strategic advantage than GPS, which, while has tremendously helpful, is not foolproof. GPS is highly susceptible to offensive jamming measures and is obfuscated in remote corners of the world devoid of democracy such as caves and dense jungles.
“The need to be able to operate effectively in areas where GPS is inaccessible, unreliable or potentially denied by adversaries has created a demand for alternative precision timing and navigation capabilities,” DARPA said in the document.
The solution is multi-faceted, relying on instruments such as self-calibrating gyroscopes and accelerometers and high-precision clocks to track your position without relying on wireless signals or external sources. The arguably even cooler portion of the project is the ASPN (All Source Positioning Navigation), a system whose sensors establish real-time tracking by piggyback off of “signals of opportunity,” such as television, radio, cell towers, satellites, and even lighting.
Ideally, ASPN and all the necessary solution segments will eventually find their way into consumer electronics in much the same way that the Internet and early GPS did, two other crucial technologies developed by the military. We should that the new technology will bypass the 50-lb backpack stage allotted to the early GPS systems in the 1970s.
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