November 2011:
ENC 2011, 29 Nov – 1 Dec, London, UK, www.enc2011.org;
ELMF 2011, 29 Nov – 30 November, Salzburg, Austria, www.lidarmap.org/ELMF/
Juniper Systems has partnered with Topcon Positioning Systems (TPS) and will manufacture the Topcon Tesla™, the newest data collector in Topcon’s full lineup of rugged handheld computers and solutions for the survey industry. The Tesla features the advantages of both a rugged handheld and a tablet PC, without the disadvantages of either.
Europe has taken a major step in its history by launching the first two operational Galileo satellites with a Soyuz launcher to reach their orbit at 23.000 kilometres. From 2014, the new constellation will enable improved services ranging from more precise in-car navigation, effective road transport management, search and rescue services, more secure banking transactions as well as reliable electricity provision, which all rely heavily on satellite navigation technologies to work efficiently. The overall economic impact is estimated to be around 90 billion euro over the next 20 years.
Russia’s GLONASS has been upgraded to a precision of up to 5 metres after the successful launch of the 24th GLONASS satellite on 3rd October 2011. The launch marked a turning point bringing the number of GLONASS satellites to a complete set, as planned by the designers. Previous versions of GLONASS had an accuracy within 50 metres.
Land & Property Services (LPS) has announced its plan to deliver a programme of improved mapping for Northern Ireland. The Positional Improvement Project, which examines the accuracy of features of LPS Ordnance Survey Northern Ireland (OSNI) maps, will deliver significant improvements to the quality of current mapping, enabling its customers to provide more efficient and accurate service delivery.
Robotic car technology being developed at Oxford University that interprets its surroundings and makes decisions about where to go could eliminate the agony and cost of traffic jams. Whilst human drivers might use GPS to find their way such systems cannot provide anything like the coverage, precision, and reliability autonomous cars need to safely navigate. GPS also fails to tell a robotic car anything about what surrounds it; its proximity to obstacles, other cars, pedestrians, or their intentions.
A spy satellite for the Japanese government rode an H-2A rocket into orbit replenishing a fleet of secret spacecraft designed to keep track of missile development in North Korea. The secret satellite, built by Mitsubishi Electric Corp., is circling Earth in a sun-synchronous orbit with an altitude of more than 300 miles. The spacecraft was a more than $500 million payload outfitted with an optical camera and telescope to supply imagery to the Japanese government for intelligence, defense and civilian remote sensing applications. The spacecraft will become an operational member of Japan’s optical spy satellite fleet.
Positioning with GPS can be realized two main ways: i-Single Point Positioning (SPP), ii- relative positioning. When the high accuracy is required, the accuracy obtained from SPP is not enough and for those applications relative positioning method have to be considered. However in this method, there should be at least two receivers to collect the data and software to process these data.
Archaeology reflects the amazing diversity of human life across the globe (Neto, 2000). Archaeological investigations are considered as a principal source of knowledge of prehistoric, ancient, and extinct cultures. In order to reconstruct history, archaeologists rely on all the unearthed evidence, such as man-made objects, which can be as small as tools and ornaments or as large as architectural residues (Xia, 2006). Thus, it is important to explore archaeological contrivance and record them in a systematic way.