All posts by Matteo Luccio
AUVs: Crucial to Seafloor Mapping Effort
In 1775, in Saybrook, Connecticut, the brothers David and Ezra Bushnell built Turtle, a little egg-shaped wooden submarine held together by iron straps, with a 30-minute air supply. The next year, in New York Harbor, Turtle engaged in the first naval battle in history involving a submarine. The first autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), undersea systems...
Running Interference
Is Ligado Networks’ proposed terrestrial nationwide network a threat to GPS or a boon to 5G? The Global Positioning System has always faced challenges inherent in its design (weak signal, orbital and clock errors, receiver noise, dilution of precision), as well as from natural phenomena (ionospheric and tropospheric delays, solar flares), local topography and the built environment...
The Return of Loran
An obsolete WWII navigation system is making a comeback In the 1980s, I used Loran-C to navigate on sailing trips off the U.S. East Coast. It had an accuracy of a few hundred feet and required interpreting blue, magenta, black, and green lines that were overprinted on nautical charts. The system was a modernized version, launched...
Apps: GnssLogger & Google’s Play in GNSS
GnssLogger? Many surveyors are familiar with the U.S. National Geodetic Survey’s Online Positioning User Service (OPUS), a cloud-based processing service that allows them to upload a Receiver-Independent Exchange (RINEX) file and receive results in minutes. Soon, they may be able to achieve centimeter accuracy by accessing raw GNSS measurements on their Android phone. Google announced...
Seeing the Light: Laser Accuracy with LightXY
On a construction site, cement and concrete finishers, carpenters, framers, electricians, plumbers, flooring installers, and other trades people spend a lot of time taking measurements and interpreting blueprints before they can even start any of the specialized tasks they are trained and paid to perform. Until recently, it was not possible to project the blueprints...
Ground Control Points as a Service?
Ground control points for aerial, satellite, and UAS imaging and remote sensing projects, large and small, can be downloaded on-demand—what a service! We look at an example service, and link to an upcoming webinar of the subject. With cameras pointed at Earth from hundreds of cubesats and tens of thousands of UAVs, in addition to...