Roscosmos Deputy head Anatoly Shilov announced yesterday significant improvement in Glonass accuracy. “Today, the system’s precision is to 6 meters, compared to 7 meters for GPS. In the next one or two years we must achieve an accuracy of 2 to 3 meters.” The statement was made at an international forum on satellite navigation held in Moscow.
Russia began developing Glonass, its national radio-based satellite navigation system in 1976 as an alternative to the US GPS and other international navigation systems. Although the system is a strong contender on the international market, it has yet to provide fully continuous global coverage. To achieve this, Glonass must complete its satellite constellation with 24 engines, just two shy of the 22 currently in operation, Shilov reminded.
At the same forum, Vice Prime minister Sergey Ivanov declared that Russia will “continue providing Glonass civil navigation services for free and without limitations across the globe.”
“Almost all leading international producers have announced the creation of chipsets using both Glonass and GPS devices,” Ivanov said with satisfaction.
Glonass performance going global
On February 2, ST-Ericsson launched “the world’s smallest receiver” to connect to both GPS and Glonass satellites.
A few days later, Broadcom, a global leader in semiconductors, announced new solutions to add Glonass to the constellation of satellites available for navigation.
In March, Russian national navigation services provider Navigation Information Systems (NIS) signed agreements with Brazilian companies to push Glonass in Latin America.
In April, Sweden’s Swepos became the first foreign network of permanent satellite reference stations to use Glonass, citing the Russian system’s better performance at northern latitudes than GPS.
Two weeks ago, a top-level NIS delegation visited India to discuss the implementation of intelligent transportation systems in Russian and Indian cities as well as further commercial development.
The Russian Ministry of Economic Development recently pledged to help NIS GLONASS find foreign partners in an effort to mobilize Russia’s commercial representations in India, Latin America, the Middle East, and the former Soviet republics, East-West Digital News reported in March.
”Russia must develop Glonass on international markets even more boldly and actively promote its intellectual potential,” insisted Vice PM Ivanov at yesterday’s conference.
Government stimulating domestic demand
The demand for Glonass-supported devices appears to be growing even more rapidly in Russia. Ivanov announced that ERA-GLONASS, the satellite-supported traffic-accident alert system, will achieve national coverage by 2014.
A few days prior to the forum, the Ministry of Transport announced it will develop a comprehensive system for monitoring road conditions that makes use of Glonass potentials. The order to undertake the project was given by Vladimir Putin, as reported on the prime minister’s official website.
While the supply of GLONASS applications has begun developing recently, so far the Russian authorities appear to be the main promoters of the market and main end-user consumers as well. In February, the government announced that all passenger cars, large transport vehicles and vehicles transporting dangerous materials will be required to use GLONASS-equipped navigators as of July 2011.
To date, however, only 10% of state and municipal vehicles are equipped with GLONASS linked devices, Vice PM Ivanov noted with regret at the forum yesterday.
AvtoVAZ, the state-controlled automaker, announced yesterday that by the end of 2011, it will churn out thousands of GPS+Glonass-equipped vehicles. The motor industry giant has already begun producing cars with embedded navigation modules, a process it started in late March, and has produced 250 such vehicles so far.
A broad range of applications
Compared to GPS-only solutions, the combined access to GPS+Glonass signals offers significant improvement in the performance of location-based services (LBS) in certain cases. While configuring for device position requires at least three satellite signals, devices that use both GPS and GLONASS almost double the number of usable satellites in the sky compared to GPS alone. Therefore, positioning is more accurate, especially in dense “urban canyon” environments.
“The combination of satellite systems will [also] augment and support more refined applications across a broad range of civil and industrial spheres, including oil & gas, mining, marine, architecture, utilities, transport, agriculture & forestry and air travel among others,” wrote Jeff Thurston, MSc, co-founder of Vector1 Media.
Comparisons between the systems, however, do not always have much meaning for consumers. “While businesses and developers of applications have their eyes and minds laser focused on the improvements and capabilities that global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) will provide, the average person does not understand GPS, knows less about GNSS and most likely has no idea what benefit the ability to work with a GPS + GLONASS collection of satellites will bring,” Thurston added.
This article made use of materials from a number of RIA Novosti reports.
