Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Location Determination to Within Centimeters - Using Your Cell Phone


In late March, Broadcom announced it had perfected a chip for hand-held devices that can use different types of location services to determine a user's position to within centimeters.  Indeed, by selectively using combinations of GNSS signals, Wi-Fi, and the various native navigation capabilities found in many smart phones - like accelerometer and aerometer - the potential exists to know location inside buildings with the same degree of accuracy.   Find below two articles on this development:



Comment: Since the dawn of civilization, surveying has been both an art and science that only a handful of highly trained professionals could do accurately.  But, developments such as this one are certain to bring reflection: "Is the profession of surveying a "dead man walking" when a common cell phone will soon be able to determine location with better accuracy than a trained surveying crew could have done 15 years ago?"

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