In very abbreviated form, here is the jotted-down gist of questions posed and answers given during the panel discussion held on Thursday afternoon in the Auditorium Saint-Exupery. The onstage discussion was followed by questions from the audience, estimate at roughly 400 of the 1,400 announced conference attendees. That audience Q&A is not noted here.

Vidal Ashkenazi asked the panel to forecast what we can expect in the area of satellite navigation in the year 2020.

Paul Verhoef, Head of Galileo Unit, DG-TREN, European Commission: Intelligence is going to get into the system. We have or will have the new satellites, and new signals. At the user segment, we need a lot of intelligence to come into the systems, to make them really valuable. We need to put a lot of thought into these devices.

Reinhold Lutz, Senior Vice president, , Navigation, EADS Astrium: We will have a new technology replacing satellite navigation as we know it today. We may have GPS IV and Galileo II at that point, and they are interoperable, and much more. There will be much more intelligence inside the receiver and integration of many services inside the receiver.

N. de Ledinghen, Vice President, Navigation and International Communications, Thales Alenia Space: The infrastructure at that point is well know to us now. I think the performance — what Paul Verhoef calls the intelligence — is what will have changed. Adding intelligence at the user segment.

J.P. Aubry, CEO, Oscilloquartz S.A.: I see GNSS bringing network control to the microsecond and nanosecond level.

Christof Hellmis, Director, Navigation & Routing Solutions, Nokia: The challenge, or one of the challenges, will be providing an ultra-low cost mobile device, costing 10 or 20 euros to manufacture. Navigation is a premium function today. It will become a standard or normal service for all of us. The end user will contribute to the service level with recommendations. Navigation is just a start.

Then Vidal Ashkenazi posed individual questions to each of the panelists.

What’s GPS III going to add and when?

John Duddy, Director GPS Programs, The Boeing Corporation: A new signal, safety-of-life, search-and-rescue. A very time-certain development is a big factor in the decision. The first satellite deployed in the 2014 timeframe, IOC in 2016 or 2017, and FOC in 2021.

Vidal Ashkenazi: Nokia acquired Navteq. What for?

Hellmis: We believe in the value of location services for users, and maps are the lowest and highest level of abstraction to enable these services. That’s why we pay this sum of money.

Vidal Ashkenazi: The European Parliament ratified the extra funding required for the Galileo project. When declared operational, and how sure are you that it will not be overshadowed by GPS III?

Verhoef: Our politicians have come to the end of the road and are forcing us all, ESA and us and industry, to deliver. The realities of any space program or project, we have to take into account, we cannot overfly them and pretend they don’t exist. The procurement phase will be the key part, where we will see what happens. Other than that, I think I had better stick to the official dates.

Vidal Ashkenazi: How will timing meet the challenges of the future?

Aubry: Sticking to telecomm, every network will need microsecond or nanosecond range of accuracy everywhere, in order to provide the services that are being forecast and called for.

Vidal Ashkenazi: Toulouse Spaceshow 2020, what will be the main topics to be discussed?

De Ledinghen: We will speak about two different things. One, much more about applications because space will be everywhere, navigation everywhere in our life. The market will be more segmented. Auto-adaptive integrity, auto-adaptive positioning. We ill stil speak aobut clocks in the user segment, highly precise clocks will be not only on the sateeliites, but in the user devices, both mass market and professional.

Here are some of the more interesting presentations I have seen in the last day and a half of the conference.

Flying with EGNOS: the San Sebastian Case, by P. Haro and co-authors.

Flight operations based on EGNOS will be possible in European airspace in 2010 once all necessary enablers are fulfilled. Assesses the value of EGNOS in a scenario with a number of operational restrictions, in this case mountainous terrain, poor meteorological conditions, lack of precision approach capability, populated areas in the vicinity of the airport, and so on. The flight demo was performed with an Air Nostrum Dash-8 aircraft, consisting of a number of Localizer Performance with Vertical guidance (LPV) approaches to runway 04 at San Sebastian airport. The SBAS avionics is a stand-alone configuration — Garmin GNS480 and a Course/Vertical Deviation Indicator (CDI/VDI) — that provides the pilot with horizontal and vertical guidance along the final approach segment. The paper presented results from the analysis of the LPV flight, including the GNSS performances, the operational advantages as well as the feedback from pilots and Air Traffic Controllers involved in the trial.

Repealite: The Repeater-Based Indoor Positioning System Real Implementation on the Receiver, by Alexandre Vervisch-Picois and co-authors.

The researchers used GNSS repeaters in sequential mode to measure code-phase jumps at the instant of transition from one repeater to the next. Once obtained, three such jumps allow the indoor location calculation. Multipath is strong indoors, so the authors concentrated on ways to remove “small delay” multipath, combining pseudolites with repeaters in a “repealite” concept.

The Concept of an Indoor Messaging System, by Satoshi Kogure and co-authors

A new indoor positioning system called Indoor Messaging System (IMES) transmits the 3-D position of the transmitter along with other information using a GNSS-like signal with position and other information embedded in the navigation message. The receiver only needs to decode the navigation message to read the transmitted position data. It is not necessary for the receiver to compute pseudorange. That is, users can get their positions in indoor environment by receiving only one IMES signal very quickly after they lost signals from satellites due to moving into buildings. Standard cell phones with GNSS receivers can receive IMES signal without any hardware modification. The receiver only needs some modification to decode the navigation message, which generally can be achieved by modifying the firmware of the receiver.

The authors developed prototype devices based on GPS C/A signal and conducted some experiments to analyze its interference impact on other GNSS signals. The result of interference analysis showed enough feasibility that IMES can operate with other GNSS without harmful interference if it is used appropriately.

6-D Positioning and Augmented Reality for Driving a Military Testbed with No Direct Vision of the Outside, by Aubert Carrel and co-authors

A lightweight tracked vehicle used by the French military integrates various man-system interfaces and computer assistance for the crew. It includes indirect vision equipment (LCD screens for all three crew members. The pilot has 6 LCD screens and no direct view of the outside. To compute augmented (or virtual) reality images, the authors use tow main inputs: a detailed digital terrain model and thematic cartography of the site, enabling generation of a virtual image from any viewpoint; and a 6D real-time positioning of the vehicle: position, heading, roll, and pitch, derived from a RTK-differential GPS receiver linked to a reference station, a gyrometer, a two-slope inclometer, and a radar speedometer.  All sensor inputs are merged with a Kalman filter to deliver a 25Hz updated positioning solution of centimetric accuracy in position and degree accuracy in the three angles. The system computes a dynamic synthetic image of the outside environment, displayed for the driver.

You may see some of these at some point as complete articles in the magazine. On to the poster sessions now!

The U.S. Department of Defense, Air Force, and GPS Wing have decided who will manufacture the GPS IIIA satellites — but they’re not telling just yet.

Col. Anthony Russo, Deputy director of the U.S. National Coordination Office for Space-based PNT, told the plenary session audience at the European Navigation Conference that the GPS Block IIIA “source selection is complete. It’s just a matter now of public announcement. I had hoped to announce it at this conference, but the process is not complete yet.”

Boeing and Lockheed Martin lead the two teams competing for the award of the GPS III space segment contract for space vehicles and GPS payloads.

Last Friday, April 18, the Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) said it is “finalizing actions necessary to complete preparations for Key Decision Point-B and the contract award decision . . . for GPS Block IIIA.” SMC added that the  award will not be announced until sometime in May.

The GPS Block III is the next, next planned major upgrade of the Global Positioning System. First, the IIF series of GPS satellites built by Boeing are slotted for launch in the January/February 2009 time frame.

Vidal Ashkenazi discusses space applications.

Day 1: Faster, Better, Cheaper – and Greener, with SatNav

Nottingham Scientific Ltd. CEO Vidal Ashkenazi (also a member of GPS World’s Editorial Advisory Board) opened the European Navigation Conference on Tuesday, April 22, with a keynote address: Space for the Benefit of Citizens, Business, and Government.

After a nod in fluent French to philosopher and scientist Rene Descartes, who combined algebra and geometry to produce Cartesian coordinates, making him, according to Ashkenazi, the father of geodesy and the grandfather of satellite navigation, he alluded to other key French pioneers in the field of space technology: the Montgolfier brothers, first to ascend into (near) space.

His subsequent keynote address in English consistently sounded the theme that combining space technologies with terrestrial sensors will create many new applications or make existing applications faster, better, cheaper, or greener.

For complete remarks by Vidal Ashkenazi, see the April System Design and Test newsletter.