David Bruemmer on the Need to Look Beyond GPS for Autonomy

When GPS was invented, absolutely no one saw the benefit of it. It's stunning. It's stunning, sounds like a very controversial, strange thing to say, but the only business entity in the entire planet that saw any value to it was through the guiding of intercontinental ballistic missiles. You see what I mean? And so it did require for that a massive government investment. It had to be architected right and it was indeed exactly what I'm describing. It required positioning but the positioning in turn required timing and is in fact atomic timing that enables the GPS system to work. We, I would argue, now have the same problem all over again. We want to make another great stride forward Most people view that stride as, quote, autonomous vehicles. What I'm saying is before we can solve the autonomous vehicle problem, we need to solve the interconnectivity problem. And the interconnectivity problem comes down to positioning and timing, just like GPS did. And unfortunately, GPS is not, nor can it ever be good enough to do it. Do you know what I mean? We know that. We know it does not work in cities. It can. have 30 to 50 meters of hour easily in in new york city and that's because of multipath that's because the frequency modulated signal from the satellites bounces around like crazy and there's nothing you can do to solve that problem so although gps is excellent and it's a really valuable technology and it's fantastic when you have open skies it's not good for driving cars through cities do we need to change that yes have we gotten by with you know gps for a long time doing lots of useful things absolutely But if we want smarter roads, if we want the reliability and the resiliency necessary to orchestrate motion, then we need to make this investment. It's not an option. It's a must. And the alternative, if we don't do that, not only will we still have dramatic and very unfortunate inefficiency in terms of driving, but sooner or later, we're going to have even bigger problems. And my hope is that all of these wonderful applications. that are based on GPS can, in fact, go forward and prosper with better, more enhanced GNSS. But we need to invest in that. It is necessary not only for the autonomous driving future that we all desperately want, or at least that many of us want, but it's necessary just for the fabric of life as we know it to be secure.