Wednesday, April 29, 2009



A Jeep, yes a jeep... but not just any jeep. This is a jeep drawn using GPS. And if you know anything about GPS, you know how difficult something like this is. Because of the noise and distance a GPS signal travels through, it usually has an error of around a few meters minimum, which would make this drawing impossible. This was done in one continuous path, with a refresh rate of half a second (Every dot is a GPS measurement, taken 2 per second). It took us about a dozen times to get it is this good, typically the resolution would bounce up over a meter and ruin the picture, especially around the metallic parts of the car and when we were close to the ground.
The reason we were able to draw it so well, was because of a technique called differential GPS, there is a GPS receiver on a roof nearby that has a very precise non-GPS position associated with, it continually receives a GPS signal, determines the error of the GPS and broadcasts that error, so that we can receive it and subtract the error from our receiver. It was not uncommon for us to see centimeter errors, COOL!
We basically took the antennae on a long cord and ran it over the 3 sides of the jeep and then took the raw points and plotted them in a 3 dimensional scale with Matlab.... doesn't look like much, but it is pretty neat.
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