NASA Builds GPS-Based System For Detecting Natural Disasters

As reported by Red Orbit: Existing GPS technologies have been enhanced by scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego to develop new systems for California and elsewhere to provide warning of hazards such as earthquakes, tsunamis and extreme weather events.

Forecasters at NOAA National Weather Service offices in Oxnard and San Diego, California demonstrated the new technology in July, using it to track a summer monsoon rain affecting Southern California and issue more accurate and timely flash flood warnings. The new technology uses real-time information from GPS stations that have been upgraded with small, inexpensive seismic and meteorological sensors.

Other real-world systems are integrating the new technology as well. For example, it is being used to make damage assessments for hospitals, bridges and other critical infrastructure that can be used in real time by emergency personnel, decision makers and first responders to help mitigate threats to public safety.

The primary goal for hospitals is to shut down elevators automatically and send alerts to operating room personnel in the event of, for example, an earthquake early warning. The earthquake early warning system is particularly effective during large events. The system could be used to detect changes in the structure of bridges due to earthquakes, wind shear and traffic loads, as well.

The implications and possible applications of the new technology were discussed by scientists from JPL and Scripps at the American Geophysical Union meeting this past week.

“These advancements in monitoring are being applied to public safety threats, from tall buildings and bridges to hospitals in regions of risk for natural hazards,” said Yehuda Bock of Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “Meaningful warnings can save lives when issued within one to two minutes of a destructive earthquake, several tens of minutes for tsunamis, possibly an hour or more for flash floods, and several days or more for extreme winter storms.”

An optimal combination of GPS, accelerometer, pressure and temperature data is the basis for the new technology. This data is collected in real time at many locations throughout Southern California and on large engineered structures—like tall buildings, hospitals and bridges—for focused studies of health and damage. The technology returns data products such as accurate measurements of permanent motions (displacements) of ground stations and instruments deployed on structures, which form the basis for early detection of sustained damage; and measurements of precipitable water in the lower atmosphere, a determining factor in short-term weather forecasting. The combination of sensors significantly improves current seismic and meteorological practices.

NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory used a regional collaborative network of GPS stations—newly expanded to provide dense coverage in Southern California—to provide atmospheric moisture measurements to forecasters in the case of the first successful Southern California monsoon forecast and more accurate flash flood warnings in July.

Hundreds of scientific-grade GPS stations throughout Southern California are constantly receiving signals from GPS satellites to determine their precise positions. GPS ground stations are simultaneously measuring water vapor as well as position because water vapor in the atmosphere distorts GPS satellite signals.

“These water vapor measurements are currently being used to help forecasters better monitor developing weather during periods between satellite overpasses and weather balloon launches,” said research scientist Angelyn Moore of JPL. “Our project is upgrading GPS ground stations to get these data to forecasters in minutes to seconds to help them better understand whether summer monsoonal moisture is likely to cause harmful flash flooding.”

“This GPS network provides forecasters with timely and critical information on the availability of atmospheric moisture, allowing us to more accurately forecast and warn for potentially deadly flash flooding and wintertime heavy precipitation events in Southern California,” said Mark Jackson, meteorologist in charge at NOAA’s National Weather Service office in Oxnard.

“Having such detailed and timely information on how much moisture is available helps us better understand and forecast our extreme winter storms fueled by what are known as atmospheric rivers. It can also help us better pinpoint and anticipate thunderstorms capable of producing flash flooding.” Weather forecasters in Southern California are moving from periodic updates of moisture content once every 30 minutes to continuous updates. Balloon launches, from four locations, occur only twice a day.

According to Bock, the technology improves earthquake early warning by analyzing the very first moments of an earthquake in real time to characterize the more violent shaking that will follow. It is possible to predict the arrival of slower-traveling seismic “S” (secondary) waves that cause the most intense shaking by detecting the initial arrival of seismic ‘P’ (primary) waves, which travel through Earth the fastest, at the upgraded GPS stations.

Depending on distance from the earthquake’s epicenter, the warning time can range between several seconds to as long as two minutes. Critical fault parameters, such as earthquake magnitude, can be rapidly and accurately determined to generate ground intensity maps throughout the affected region, and form the basis of tsunami warnings.

The scientists are planning to integrate the technology into earthquake and tsunami early warnings and structural monitoring for the San Diego County Office of Emergency Service. Other institutions are examining the applications of the technology as well, such as hospital monitoring and early warnings for UC San Diego Medical Center in Hillcrest; monitoring of the Vincent Thomas Bridge in Long Beach for Caltrans; and forecasts of storms and flooding for NOAA’s weather forecasting offices in San Diego and Los Angeles.

Geofencing to Unlock Vehicle Functions Detailed in New Apple Patent Application

As reported by MAC Rumors: In June, Apple filed a new patent application [PDF] with the European Patent Office describing a system using an in-car accessory with an iOS device to set up geofences to activate various vehicle functions as a user approaches a vehicle.

According to the 15-claim application, which specifically describes "Accessory control with geo-fencing", the accessory (which may or may not be built-in to the car itself) would transmit a signal to a linked mobile device, allowing the device to monitor the location of a vehicle. When the mobile device (and the user) are close enough to the car, the mobile device would transmit a second signal to the accessory within the car, allowing it to trigger functions like door unlocking, defrosting, heating, trunk opening, seat warming, and more. 

The first signal can identify a current or future location of the vehicle. The mobile phone can generate one or more virtual geofences based at least in part on the location of the vehicle as determined from the first signal. For example, a geofence can be defined as a circular boundary centered on the vehicle's location, the radius being equal to a pre-defined distance. The mobile phone can repeatedly estimate its own location.

Upon detecting that the mobile phone has crossed a geofence (e.g., generally or in a particular direction), the mobile phone can generate and transmit a second signal to the vehicle. The accessory can control or coordinate control of one or more vehicle functions in response to receipt of the second signal.

Apple notes that geofences can be made in shapes that parallel vehicle components for very specific in-app functions. For example, a geofence could be tied specifically to a trunk or a door, with the mobile device able to identify the absolute-location boundaries of each individual geofence. With such accurate geofencing, a car's trunk could be opened as a user approaches, for groceries or bags to be put away, while the car doors stay locked until later approached. 

Geofences can also function on time, with features like a car's heating system able to be activated when a mobile device estimates that an owner is "five minutes away and approaching the vehicle."

Like Apple's iBeacons, which are designed to transmit specific location information to mobile devices, Apple's vehicle accessory system would potentially send signals over Bluetooth LE to activate various functions within the car. Apple suggests Wi-Fi and cellular hardware could also be included in order for the accessory to communicate with mobile devices when owners are located far from their cars.

Along with serving as a possible expansion of the use of Apple's iBeacon technology, the geofencing system described in the patent could also be a future expansion of Apple's iOS in the Car initiative, which is designed to provide enhanced iOS integration in automobiles.

The first hints of iOS in the Car have been bundled into the new 2014 Honda Civic, allowing users to access HondaLink apps for iOS to connect to an iPhone 5 or later. Apple's ultimate goal for iOS in the Car is far more advanced, however, with iOS built-in to in-dash systems.

The patent, which was filed in June and published in November, lists former Apple employee Sylvain Louboutin as an inventor.

Street View-style Imagery Lets Mobile Devices Locate Themselves Indoors As Accurately as GPS

As reported by MIT Technology Review: Smartphones locate themselves outdoors using a GPS sensor, but those signals are typically blocked indoors. A new technique uses a device’s camera to get an indoor location fix to an accuracy of within a meter. The technique could enable new kinds of apps, and may be particularly valuable for wearable computers such as Google Glass.

The new location-fixing method is being developed at the University California, Berkeley. It uses a photo from a device’s camera to work out the location and orientation of the device. It does this by matching the photo against a database of panoramic imagery of a building’s interior, similar to the outside views offered by Google’s Street View. The system can deduce the device’s location because it knows the position of every image in that database.

The researchers used a special backpack that captures Street View-style imagery indoors as the wearer carries it around. It has two fisheye cameras, laser scanners, and other sensors. Software uses the data collected to generate a map of the building’s interior, a stitched-together set of panoramas, and a database of individual images that can be used for location lookups.

“You can provide that blue dot you see on a mobile map when out-of-doors for interiors,” says Avideh Zakhor, who leads the Berkeley group developing the system. Zakhor previously sold a 3-D city mapping company to Google that became a major part of the company’s Google Earth 3-D virtual globe.

Zakhor and colleagues have tested their system in buildings on the Berkeley campus and in a mall in Fremont, California. In tests at the mall, they successfully matched more than 96 percent of images taken by a smartphone’s camera against the database of images. When the matches were turned into location fixes, most came out with an error of less than a meter from the device’s true location.

Zakhor says her approach compares favorably with competing methods of determining location indoors in terms of accuracy and the cost of deployment. Alternative methods include using Bluetooth “beacons” or fingerprinting the pattern of Wi-Fi signals inside a building.

Jonathan Ventura, senior researcher at Graz University of Technology, Austria, agrees. “The major advantage of image-based localization is that it works almost everywhere and doesn't require changing the environment in any way,” he says.

Zakhor’s group isn’t the only one capturing such data: Google has begun taking its Street View product inside and announced last month that it had documented the interiors of 16 airports and over 50 train stations.

Ventura’s own research focuses on augmented reality. He says that if devices can be located very accurately it will allow for virtual and real worlds to be closely aligned. “If we want to render a rich and complex virtual world into a high-resolution image,” he says, “we need to have much more accurate positioning than a consumer GPS receiver can deliver.”

Zakhor is planning tests of her method on computerized glasses, with the intention of having the devices use snapshots to track their location, making it possible to provide a map of an interior space in a person’s field of vision. The Berkeley research group is also working on using data from Wi-Fi signals collected by their backpack to provide a secondary method of deducing a device’s indoor location.

New Trucking Regulations to Shrink Capacity, Spur Rate Increase, Economist Says

As reported by Overdrive: Trucking faces the largest concentration of regulatory changes in its history beginning next year, economist Eric Starks, President of research firm FTR, said Wednesday.

The changes include CARB trailer regulations, hours of service changes, new greenhouse gas/mpg regulations, as well as potential mandatory electronic onboard recorder and speed limiter requirements.

The regulatory bottleneck heading toward the trucking industry in 2014 — and partly already in effect, headlined by the hours-of-service rule changes that went into effect July 1 — will further shrink the driver pool and the industry’s capacity and could lead to a 6 percent increase in truckload rates by the second quarter of 2014, said Mr. Starks. 

Starks spoke at CCJ‘s Fall Symposium in Scottsdale, Ariz., this week, where he told an audience of fleet executives that some estimates show that fleets will need to hire an additional 1.5 million drivers to maintain current productivity levels, due to regulatory changes that loom. 

He pointed to tightening emissions regulations in California, federal greenhouse gas and mpg regulations, electronic logging device mandate, speed limiter requirements and the already-underway hours-of-service changes as a concentration of regulations that will be what he called “game-changers” for the industry.

Starks said his estimates show that fleets will need 150,000 to 200,000 additional drivers to maintain current productivity in the coming years, and the regulations will create a tough environment for smaller fleets and create barriers for newcomers to the industry. 

The 6 percent increase in truckload rates “is a good number,” Starks said,” but not as dramatic as the initial data suggests” due to a rate drop this summer. 

GPS Farming App Goes Global

As reported by Ag Professional: A new precision crop management tool for mobile devices was introduced by AgDNA. 

Since AgDNA was launched by founder Paul Turner less than six months ago, the cloud-based program has registered users in more than 80 countries with six million acres of farmland boundary mapped.

The growth rate of one million acres a month is set to accelerate with the launch of a version for Android smartphones and tablets to complement the original system developed for iPhone and iPad.

To help build international penetration, AgDNA was showcased at the world’s biggest farm machinery show, Agritechnica, which attracted more than 450,000 visitors to Hanover in Germany in November.

“Our mobile farming platform has excited a lot of interest and feedback in the European farming community,” Turner said.

The intuitive software is a free download from the AppStore or Google Play and can be used for a number of applications each month at no charge.  Inexpensive subscription plans are available for larger farms and power users.

Turner said the technology had unique features, including the ability to track machinery operating in the field in real time using the mobile device’s GPS, linking multiple users to a single account and displaying season activities for each field.

“It allows farmers to make full use of the ever increasing amount of electronic data being generated in modern agricultural systems.

“It brings all this data together in a usable form to help the farm business run more smoothly,” said Turner, who has an extensive background in precision farming and was a pioneer in the development of GPS auto-steering technology in Australia and the USA.

New data only needs to be entered into the AgDNA system once and if there is no internet connection it automatically uploads when the device comes back into range.

“The program can be accessed by multiple operators, including work groups in the field, agronomists and advisers, in packing sheds and processing facilities.

“This makes for easy planning and coordination of farming activities,” Turner said.

Once the field boundaries on a property have been mapped or imported other information such as soil profiles, irrigation and fertilizer applications can be overlaid to provide a complete picture.

Weather data can also be added to build a detailed history of how individual crops have performed across the seasons.

“We are working closely with machinery manufacturers so that electronic data being generated on crop yields or fertilizer application or spray rates can be readily up loaded to the AgDNA program.

“A lot of this technology is now invisible. The capability is built into the machinery and it is just a matter of collating it all into a format that the farmer can use to help in their decision making.

“AgDNA is an extremely powerful farm management tool when all the data comes together. Information that might otherwise take months to assemble can be captured as it is generated,” Turner said.

All the data is stored in a secure account on the Internet where it can’t be lost or corrupted, with access password protected.

“When it comes to meeting external demands such as quality assurance or product traceability, all the information needed about the history of a particular crop can be extracted with ease.”
“We are continuing to work closely with farmers, agronomists, retailers and service providers to increase the information gathering potential of AgDNA as more and more electronic data is generated.”

“The potential productivity gains, improved yields and timely access to critical farm data using mobile devices and connected data services is huge.

“AgDNA is quickly being recognized as an industry leader in this space and we are committed to helping growers around the world to access their farm data wherever and whenever they want,” Turner said.

An Alternative to the iBeacon; Qualcomm Has Low-Cost Gimbal Proximity Beacons

Apple's iBeacon isn't the only game in town when it comes to
Bluetooth Smart Proximity devices for retailers.  Qualcomm's
Gimbal proximity sensor is now available, supporting IOS today
and Android in the future.  Get ready for a Hyper-personal in-store
shopping experience.

As reported by GigaOM: Apple’s iBeacon is already tracking where you are in Apple Stores in order to present a more personalized experience.

It’s not the only game in town though. Qualcomm’s Gimbal Proxmity Beacons are now available for as low as $5 in quantity, the company announced on Monday. Currently a favorite vendor for chips in smartphones, Qualcomm’s Gimbal represents another product to keep the company powering mobile devices, smartwatches and just about any other Internet of Things connected gadget.

There are actually two Gimbal sensors now available: The small Series 10, measuring 28 x 40 x 5.6 millimeter and the larger Series 20 that takes up a 95 x 102 x 24 millimeter footprint. Both use low-energy Bluetooth Smart technology for detailed micro-location data; accurate within a foot. The idea is that retailers can add the Gimbal sensors throughout a brick-and-mortar store to see where customers are. That data provides the opportunity for a hyper-personal shopping experinece, says Qualcomm:

“Use of the platform enables brands to increase sales and drive loyalty by delivering highly relevant communications while those consumers are physically present in their stores and venues. Brands using the Gimbal platform can send customized communications based on interest derived from geofence triggers and proximity triggers, all matched to inferred interests.“

The concept is exactly what Apple is trying to do in its stores — as is Macy’s, which has installed Apple’s iBeacon in some locations. With accurate in-store location data of customers, retailers know what section of the store potential buyers are in. It can then tailor ads, product information, even limited in-store product specials, to the most likely buyers of such products.

The use of Bluetooth makes far more sense than other alternatives: NFC generally requires a customer action, such as tapping a phone to a tag, while GPS is pure overkill and not likely as accurate in some indoor locations. Before Bluetooth Smart, the Bluetooth wireless technology simply lacked either the range or used too much power to effectively be a detailed proximity location tool.

Qualcomm’s Gimbal product, which combines “physical location, activity, time and personal interests” currently supports iOS devices for now but the company says Android support is planned. This past January, I got a demo of how Gimbal can be used in other unique ways, such as the launch of a new Star Trek movie. Qualcomm can’t beam you up just yet, but it can provide computers with your exact location.

Germany’s DHL Test Delivers Medicine by Drone

As reported by GigaOM: Germany’s postal service has completed its first drone-based package delivery, successfully using a “Paketkopter” to carry a pack of medicine from a Bonn pharmacy to the Deutsche Post (DHL) headquarters a kilometer away.

When Amazon announced its own drone delivery plans just over a week ago, DHL was quick to say that it too was already developing a similar scheme. Monday’s maiden flight proves this to be true. However, Germany’s airspace rules remain unclear on drones, and this flight required a special permit.

According to Deutsche Welle, DHL currently has no plans to actually launch drone-based deliveries. This was just a trial to check the technological feasibility of the idea.

In that case, medicine was a great choice. It’s light, which is handy as drones aren't very strong. It’s also something that could plausibly merit very urgent delivery — delivering stuff via drone only makes economic sense when time is of the essence, due to fuel costs and the fact that drones will probably only be able to carry one package at a time.