Friday, October 10, 2008

MIT spawns tech that succeeds when GPS fails

By Brendan Lynch

Technology being developed by MIT students is zeroing in on the defense industry’s need for navigation units that work when global-positioning system technology doesn’t.

Because GPS requires a line-of-sight connection with four satellites, it doesn’t work indoors. So soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan relying on GPS may mistake a fellow soldier for an enemy fighter in a cave or urban building. And firefighters are unable to use GPS to find a fellow jake felled by smoke inhalation in a burning building.

Two MIT students have launched startup Course Zero Automation to develop an inertial navigation unit called, for now, the “iGPS.” A second startup, called Ubitrack, was a finalist in last spring’s MIT $100K Business Plan Competition, with technology using a peer-to-peer network as a backup to GPS. But its founders have back-shelfed commercialization plans in order to shift its focus from defense to the mobile-phone market.

Course Zero’s handheld iGPS is intended to be low-cost, low-power and highly accurate, updating information from the satellite network 50 times per second. The device uses inertial sensors — accelerometers and gyroscopes — and magnetic field sensors in case the GPS connection is interrupted. With a GPS connection, the device is accurate to within 1 meter, and without GPS the redundant sensors can be accurate to within about 3 meters.

The two-man operation was started by MIT mechanical engineering undergraduates Ted Blackman and Josh Siegel. The duo’s prototype won the $3,000 Boeing Co. prize at the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies Soldier Design Competition last April. Siegel said he got the idea while building a self-driving Power Wheels jeep. “I needed a way of knowing exactly where it was,” he said.

The company wants to avoid venture capital if it can and said it still has enough money left over from the ISN prize money to build two or three more prototypes. Course Zero has taken advantage of free samples electronics companies give to students, using them for the iGPS’ microcontroller and some of the sensors. “We’ve got a really slow burn rate,” Siegel said.

The pair are debugging the hardware now, with software to follow, and are plotting a course for the defense and first-responder markets. Firefighters could use the device to locate a fallen comrade, he said.
Another market may be aerospace, said Defense Technology Initiative director Don Quenneville, a retired Air Force brigadier general. He said airlines are increasingly using the polar routes, where GPS is unavailable. Quenneville said the technology would also be handy for soldiers to have accurate location technology when GPS is unavailable to call in air strikes. “It’s nice to have a backup system,” Quenneville said.

As for Ubitrack, it had initially planned for its device to benefit soldiers, who could triangulate their positions — even indoors — by connecting to four colleagues, rather than four satellites. Ubitrack has since reverted to a research project, according to Inaki Berenguer, an entrepreneur at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. “It was too early to start a company,” Berenguer said.

Ubitrack still plans to commercialize its technology someday, and Berenguer said the latest target for Ubitrack is the mobile phone market, where a social networking application could let users know when friends are nearby. But the typical phone’s battery life is too limiting, since the phone would be broadcasting the user’s position while otherwise idle, draining the charge.

In the meantime, the researchers are working to prove the concept and may seek to license the product to the defense industry, Berenguer said.