Australia Moves North At Rate Of ~5 Feet Every 20 Years — How Will This Affect GPS Systems In Autonomous Vehicles?
As a result of predictable tectonic activity, the Australian continental plate moves northwards at a rate of around 2.8 inches a year — with around 5 feet of movement in just the last 22 years. As a result, the country is notably out of sync with GPS systems.
As a means of dealing with this, the government will be shifting its official longitude and latitude to bridge the gap between local coordinates and those from global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) in 2017, according to recent reports.
Which brings up some interesting questions concerning possible autonomous driving technologies that rely (to some degree or other) on GPS. While future autonomous vehicles will no doubt be heavily outfitted with cameras, radar, lidar, etc. — as well as the hardware and software to usefully process the inputs — GPS will presumably factor in as well.
On that note, the group responsible for the upcoming change has argued that it would aid in the deployment of autonomous vehicles.
Interestingly, the upcoming change to co-ordinates are an over-correction, and won’t actually be accurate until 2020.
BBC News provides more, revealing that “the Geocentric Datum of Australia, the country’s local co-ordinate system, was last updated in 1994. Since then, Australia has moved about 1.5 meters north. So, on 1 January 2017, the country’s local co-ordinates will also be shifted further north – by 1.8 meters. The over-correction means Australia’s local co-ordinates and the Earth’s global co-ordinates will align in 2020. At that point a new system, which can take changes over time into account, will be implemented.”
Dan Jaksa of Geoscience Australia commented: “We used the old plate fixed system to make life simple, but we don’t want to do this adjustment every so often. Once we have a system that can deal with changes over time, then everybody in the world could be on that same system.”
Speaking on the need for accurate GPS information, he stated: “If you want to start using driverless cars, accurate map information is fundamental. We have tractors in Australia starting to go around farms without a driver, and if the information about the farm doesn’t line up with the co-ordinates coming out of the navigation system there will be problems.”
I wonder how Tesla is approaching this problem….
Photo by Brian Costelloe (some rights reserved)
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