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Designs on the Games

Tuesday 7th October 2008
Savoy Place, London

Organised by PhoneAbility and the IET

Location technology enablers

by Clive de la Fuente

In the next 30 minutes or so I would like to take you on the brief tour of positioning systems that are available today and look at what will be available inthe future looking out to 2012 and a little beyond. I will then touch on a few of the applications of these technologies, as they might relate to the Games. But I won't go into all the details of those applications because some of them will be covered by other speakers.

Firstly though, I would like to quickly introduce the work of the knowledge transfer networks. KTNs are managed networks funded by the technology strategy board that promote the growth of the UK economy. Obviously, KTNs are set up in key areas of growth for the UK. So they either have a sector focus or market focus or technical focus. There are 24 KTNs, from security to health technologies for example.

What do these KTNs do? A network of networks bringing people together. We try to bring people together, whether it's the Government who can influence the policy, funding bodies, research, users or suppliers.

The way in which we do that is that we hold a series of events for example, maybe workshops or seminars, and they may be of a technical or application nature of road mapping nature or even touching on things that go across those things such as privacy in location based services.

We also do what we call consortium building, bringing people together so they can go and bid for funds for example from the European framework programmes or Government. For example a consortium from our KTN recently won £2 million in the data gathering and complex environments from the TSB. A point of focus for companies outside ofthe UK looking for partners inside the UK, in this field.

So in the location and timing KTN, we have 870 people from about 570 organisations, including academia, industry spread right across the country.

We get involved with all aspects of location, all the technologies I have listed there we'll go into in a few minutes and the applications. Not forgetting timing because people forget that GPS for example does get timings signals as well which are used to synchronise the whole of the telephone network, whether that's is the British Telecom fixed line network or indeed all the mobile phones as well.

We are free to join. We produce a news alert every 2 weeks which comes to you by email it keeps you abreast of what's happening in the industry.

So any way on to some of the technologies. Firstly then, GPS the global positioning system. I started tracking satellites back in 1986, when there were only 4 satellites in the sky. I had to wait until about 3 o'clock in the morning until they came into position. Since then the GPS has become common place in many applications that started off mainly in the marine world, went into the navigation systems, and today is a big market is in the personal navigation devices the Tom Toms of this world.

So full operational capability for GPS was announced in 1995, so full constellation since then. A big step forward was taken in 2000, when they removed what was an intentional degradation of the signal to only let civilians have hundred metre accuracy. Now we benefit from the full accuracy available as I will come on to in a second. There are 31 satellites in orbit, at anyone time on the ground you can maybe track round 12 satellites.

The other points there are just to say that GPS is evolving, has evolved since 1995, it's evolving and moving forward. There's a plan to place new satellite launch new capabilities in 2018, giving better accuracy and performance.

How does GPS work? Well the satellites are 20,000 kilometres above the earth surface - that's quite a long way. By the time the signals reach us they are very weak. If you imagine the satellite in space, it's emitting a signal. A second satellite emits a second signal you can imagine that the two ranges would meet on a circle. If you then have a third satellite, that circle from the third satellite will cut the first circle in two places - one on the earth surface and one in hyper space. Clearly the more satellites the more effective the accuracy we work with usually 4 satellites, all the ranges into a solution to get the best possible GPS results.

So how accurate is it these days. Well, the good news is that the accuracy, this is the range, accuracy as data given by the Americans who run the system.

You can see that over the years the accuracy ofa signal range from the satellite to receiver has improved by round about 5 metres down to under a metre today. So continuing evolution of the system improving the signal. That's just on a single range to a single satellite. When you put that together with 4 or more satellites, what sort of position accuracy do you get?

Well in this picture, we have here outside on the floor a GPS receiver. I did this test a couple of days ago, it's on the floor you can see it basically a 3 storey building here, this side it's fairly free of obstructions. I tracked the satellites for a period of 2 hours, and produced a position every 30 seconds. You can see on the top there a number of satellites that we're tracking was 9, 8, occasionally down to 7 satellites in that open sky. The report of accuracy by the GPS receiver itself is coming out, started off about 10 metres, quickly came into about 3 metres there, number of satellites went down the estimated accuracy went up slightly to round 7 or 8 metres. But in reality, when you plot it out on something like Google Earth you can actually only produce 2 points because they are so close together, there's a resolution of about 2.5 metres in reality. So very accurate system when outdoors and a fairly clear view of the sky.

A few things have happened over maybe the last 2 years, to improve things even more. The first is what's called high sensitivity receivers, this is multi-correllator architecture that allows you to pick up even better the weak signals from satellites. When they started with GPS out into the field I used to carry a suitcase with me. I used to record the data on to a cassette. About 10 years ago we developed a product this size, this basically the size of a brick. Its got lots of processing power on there lots of chips, lots all that sort of stuff. Things have moved on a little bit.

Now most of them is inside a chip which is you can't even see, it I can't see it from here, 4 MM by 2 MM. Things have gotten a lot smaller. That enables them to be put inside mobile devices.

And of course, the cost has come right down. The cost for those chips now in the very high volumes of millions that we need to these day are down to a couple of dollars level. The other thing that has happened is that there are some enhancements to GPS which allows you to provide a systems data to get it started. The hard part in tracking the satellites is tracking them. You can now provide assistance data especially for things like mobile phones where you have a communication link. Information can be sent to the phone which enables it to get started a lot quicker in a lot harsher environments. Whereas before there was no chance of being able to track satellites inside a building, now there is every chance.

So as I was saying, you can now put those new chips inside mobile phones, provide data to them - the assistance data they work in a lot of places. It also enables applications in that you can do things like trailer tracking where you can put a GPS/GPRS system underneath the vehicle rather than having to cable the top of the cap all that's sort of stuff.

So in terms of properties, I will show you the same picture before here of the building.

And this block now is actually inside the building, not outside. And this test was actually done over an evening - 11 hours, and every 5 minutes. Our offices are actually upstairs but we do have a lot of other space with things in but we have very thick walls in our building. The estimated number of satellites sometimes its still up at 10, it did drop down to 7 for periods where you can see the accuracy is a little bit worse than it was before, no great surprise, but still roughly speaking 5 metres or so going up to maybe 12. And again there's 140 points there but they only actually plot on about 10 different points because they are all within about 10 metres of the building.

So it will work in some domestic properties. But it won't work everywhere.

This example is what I call deep in doors, right in the centre of the building, it's got offices round it, not just one wall to get out, maybe 2 or 3 walls to get out on the ground floor, very bottom of the floors so its not even moving round. So now, you can see the scatter is greater, and so is the accuracy, I have split out the number of satellites this time as you can see sometimes 5, going up to 8, but here it's only going down to 2 and 3 satellites. Of course there are some drop outs. On average there's about 25% of it.

Outdoors provides exceptional performance, with vehicle tracking you can see the trace of the vehicle going down the left hand side heading south.

And if you zoom right in on that, using something like Google maps, you even see which side of the road the cars are travelling on. It really is that good. And the thing to point out there of course is that 10 years ago, if I had put the same very accurate GPS on a set of base maps, the maps would be so far off we would have been in a field. So over the last decade the maps have really improved as well.

I'd just like to dispell a couple of myths that we read in the press about GPS being the Big Brother in the sky. It's not. The device, whatever the device is, gives the position of the device, it doesn't send anything back to the satellites, it's a one way system. So unless you choose to subscribe to a service or whatever, that provides that information back to where you are, then GPS itself is intrinsically safe. Different GPS chips have different performance levels. So when people say GPS is this good or that good they should really be saying this GPS with this chip set, this implementation is this good. There's lots of different and varying levels of performance out there. Some of them are more low-cost than others, some are better performance.

The other thing is, I mentioned the very weak signals if you choose to put your GPS antenna inside a casing, as sometimes there are 6 or 7 other RF antennas inside that device to operate your wi-fi, blue tooth, they all interfere with each other. You can have a very good GPS chip set but bad implementation and it won't work as well. In some cases it is put it on the outside of a casing - a sensible precaution!

There are limitations though with satellite navigation systems. They do not work perfectly indoors, can't give the heading, when you move you can see where you are going when you are static you can't. In an urban canyon you might not be able to see through buildings. You get bounces off buildings which can give you multi-paths. As it comes from the ionosphere, how do we know where things have gone wrong?

Firstly, there's what's called satellite based augmentation systems (SBAS). These augment the basic satellite system. Many GPS receivers have this information automatically. These SBAS send down directions to improve the accuracy every metre. They also provide integrity information which warns of failures within 6 seconds. And the Americans have had a system available for a while called WAAS - wide area augmentation system. We have EGNOS, the European geo-stationary navigation system in trials at the moment and will be available from next year. Clearly this is very important, what you really want to know is if you are getting in a bad position.

There are other systems, there is the Russian system called GLONASS, first launched in 1982, but unfortunately it fell into a little bit of decline over the years. But recently has seen an increase as to improve the system as there will be 24 satellites available by the end of next year. That will give in terms of coverage today, about 18 satellites. We can see there are some areas where performance is degraded but by the end of 2009 it gets better, by 2010 there will be 24 satellites up there working globally. So systems that have GPS and GLONASS will be tracking round 60 satellites.

Of course there is the European equivalent of GPS coming along called Galileo. Unfortunately the target for completion of that is 2013. So just after the Games unfortunately, this will have extra features services and benefits available.

Now moving on to technologies, not satellite based. Clearly mobile phones connect to a base station to make a telephone call. And if you know where the base station is you can get an idea of signal strength to that base station and that will give you rough idea of the area in which you are. Enhancements to that you will see in cell towers where they have 3 different dishes pointing in different directions meaning you can cut down the complete circle, you can also limit the furthest and nearest signal strength to give you a signal. It texts you approximately where you are depending on accuracy. The accuracy in rural areas is less, in the centre of town it might be down to 100, 200 metres. There are other ways of using these signals, just like GPS it's possible to trilaterate off different GPS stations to get a position accurate to around hundred metres. New systems such as import matrix will get down even further than that.

There's a company in the UK called Path Intelligence that uses these signals in shopping malls. They set up their own mini base stations that can hear your phone. They can work out where your phone is to an accuracy of a couple of metres. It's done totally anonymously - you don't know about it they don't know who you are or anything like that, but they know that there is a mobile phone moving between the shops. This assists in proving paths route facilities in finding out shopping trends in shopping malls. So maybe something you could do, for example, within the Olympic village.

On the other side there are now new little chips about the same size as the GPS chips called MEMs, Micro-Electro-Mechanical-Systems. They are little accelerometers, they can monitor movement. So as you move forward, it can measure how far you have moved. The problem with MEMs traditionally is that they drift with time so you might move 10 metres but it's drifted a metre by the time you have moved hundred metres, the drift is 10 metres. But if you put that into a mobile phone, with GPS and calibrate it when you are outside, you can then use that to go back inside. When you go back out again it will snap back to the GPS position. The other thing just coming out now, is a 3 dimensional compass. This give you headings whereas before with 2 dimensional you had to hold the compass very flat. With these you don't have to worry about that which is ideal when you come out of the tube station you don't know where you are. You can get a GPS fix, now it can start pointing you in the right direction and you can head off in the direction that you want to go.

Indoors, Wi-Fi positioning systems based on wireless LAN, (the sort of wireless LAN you might have for your home broadband) that's fitted into big organisations such as hospitals and so on can be used as a simple tag system to position yourself. It works very similarly to the way GPS works, but it can give you a position inside the hospital to a metre or so. That's where its being used primarily at the moment - to locate things like beds, so they don't actually lose beds and equipment, and have to find them quickly on occasions. It's a very time saving device. Some things that people talked about earlier that's driven forward in the last year things like technology standardisation, and bringing in mass production.

Some of these wireless signals sneak out into the outside world not just inside, there's a wireless network in here. Chances are you can receive it in the street if you were to log on. A company in the States called SkyHook drive round mapping all these signals against your address and the Wi-Fi signal, and they use that in conjunction with the database of cell positions and GPS, if available, to give a best possible location outside or anywhere.

So you can see what they do - their positioning system here they are using GPS in the rural areas, its excellent as soon as you start getting to urban areas you start using the base station and the Wi-Fi mapping.

We have talked about proximity solutions earlier today. The point is that they are all coming together inside the mobile phone. And of course other specialist devices, but we're now seeing satellite navigation in there, cell ID, wireless LAN, the MEMs and compass, other things like barcode readers, fingerprint recognition, e-payment has been talked about. This is tending towards ubiquitous positioning. Positioning everywhere. It's not just me saying this but if you look at Nokia, for example, over the last couple of years, during the second quarter of 2008 Nokia surpassed the traditional navigation manufacturers and shipped 4.6 million units with integrated GPS. Now we have not quite seen that here yet, but it is coming!

Nokia have launched a website called the Legends Telegraph. They target 8 different areas of new research and development that are important to Nokia - location, GPS maps and compass indoor positioning, Nokia are now doing trials on indoor positioning in big stadia. Traffic as I mentioned before, everybody is using mobile phones they can actually see how many people are moving in a particular area. And the near field communication we have just been talking about, touch to share, touch pay, touch tip all those sort of things key to bigger players.

Where are these things going to be? We touched on transportation, public transport, private transport, bringing the whole infrastructure together. It can be based not just on historical performance, and trends but can be dynamic based on congestion. Visualisation we have talked about that today, maybe the days of flat maps have gone. You will be able to view things in different ways, maybe a mix of reality and non-reality.

So on the left hand site people might prefer to see the way you need to go marked on the ground with pictures of the buildings on either side. Or we might use true pictures but augment it with a little bit of virtual reality saying which is the direction to the ramp for wheelchair users for example.

For the Games themselves you can then on your mobile phone bring out content which could be a menu based on where you are and what's in the local facility, bring down your fixture listing your event timings, competitor profiles, location, maps, results. And very much content driven based upon the location. A totally digital experience everywhere.

Personal applications including things like a Buddy Finder, so if you subscribe to some sort of service you know where you are and you can find out where your friends are, if you are at a particular event, meet them at the cafe or whatever. Then there's the proximity side of things, as we talked about ticketing, registration.

Personal security side of things not just for the masses but maybe for the key personnel, the officials, dignitaries, always based on location technologies. Could be on mobile phone, or specific devices. Such as the one that is used in the NHS - an Identicom which is a cellular based system. There's a microphone in there if you have got a problem you can speakto someone and say I have got a problem here.

Clearly there's a role in emergency response co-ordination, about knowing where your assets are, fire, ambulance, police, security. Again you can notify people in a given area if necessary, as long as you know where they are.

Logistics. That will be key for the Games of course, getting all the infrastructure in and out of London is going to be a nightmare. Logistics, planning, tracking of the vehicles, and so on, warehousing will be key to a successful Games. There's also fuel saving with speed restrictions you can get again from location based information.

Not forgeting the timing and synchronisation side again. You will need extra capacity, as has been talked about earlier on the telephone networks. And it's the timing signals from GPS that will actually give the very high quality timings needed to maximise the bandwidth of the network especially when they bring in the mobile office into the network. Time dissemination as well, there's nothing worse than going somewhere where the clock is 5 minutes slow, you will have a network where time is synchronised together.

Finally there's also event viewing as well, the ability to track races on a particular event.

This happens to be the London Marathon I did for somebody a couple of years back. It may not be appropriate for the Olympics, but certainly it's the same application where, I don't know, if you watch some it's almost impossible to see what's going on, who's trying to win this race, but in this particular case you can see dynamically that one boat is going slightly wider, the other a bit tighter you can start to see they cross and who's ahead. There's application there as well.

So, that's the end of the talk. I would like to think that the location and time technologies are a key enabler for a well organised safe, green and fun Games. Thank you. {Applause}

JOHN GILL: Thanks very much. Any questions? I can't see any hands up at the moment. Alright then. Thank you very much Clive.

We now move on to Jim Slater. Jim has worked for 15 years in the area of accessibility both in the area of smartcard systems and particularly in television systems.

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