AUTO21 – Automobile of the 21st Century
Satellite technology could help build better, safer cars
Navigational satellites orbiting 20,000 kilometres above the Earth have
the potential to revolutionize the automotive industry and help build
"smart" cars for the 21st century.
Dr. Elizabeth Cannon, a University of Calgary geomatics engineering
professor and a researcher with the AUTO21 network – one of Canada's
20 federal Networks of Centres of Excellence – has seen the potential
that these satellites hold for developing innovative applications for
the automotive industry.
Dr. Cannon says she is excited about capitalizing on the unparalleled
ability of these satellites to help us locate and position ourselves here
on Earth-from space. "GPS totally captured my imagination. I thought,
if I can get involved with this, I don't know how it will impact society,
but I knew it was going to in major ways."
In 2001, Dr. Cannon was the first female recipient of the Johannes Kepler
Award, the world's most prestigious satellite navigation prize. She considers
her contribution to the AUTO21 research program as a natural extension
of her award-winning research in satellite navigation. "We already
have systems in cars, particularly in Japan, that allow you to navigate
between points A and B," explains Dr. Cannon. "They work reasonably
well. Now we're at the point of asking, 'What else can we do?'"
One answer may turn out to be autonomous hands-free driving using an
automatic pilot. "If I had a database of the locations of various
stores and services, I could program my system to navigate my way there,"
says Cannon. A vehicle equipped with a wireless Internet connection could
provide the driver with anything from real-time traffic information, to
what the latest specials are in various stores. The driver could then
make decisions based on the data.
"One of the real challenges is that GPS is a line-of-sight system,"
she says. "This makes it difficult to use in urban areas. So the
question is how can we mitigate its limitations by integrating it with
other systems?" Working with the DaimlerChrysler Corporation, Dr.
Cannon is exploring ways of combining GPS with existing, commercially
available, inertial navigation systems – sensors inside a vehicle
that record its rate of acceleration and direction. Her work is focused
on developing algorithms and error modeling that will provide the best
mathematical ways for merging the two different types of information provided
by GPS and inertial systems.
Applications of this work include the development of "collaborative"
driving systems that can instantly calculate the distance between cars
on a clogged freeway. "We want to develop a car-based system that
would allow it to continuously position the vehicle to centimetre-level
accuracy in real-time," says Dr. Cannon.
While this highly precise positioning is probably more than what's needed
for getting to the corner store, it's the kind of ability that opens up
whole new realms of possibilities for the driving experience of the future.
www.auto21.ca
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