![]() ![]() It's not okay for a driverless car to get bewildered for a bit because it's in a city center.Ī second problem: devices that intentionally disrupt GPS are becoming more common, which is potentially a major danger for ships and planes. They have to work 100 percent of the time. After all, autonomous vehicles can't just work 99 percent of the time. Unreliable signals could become a much bigger issue if we try to fill the roads with self-driving cars, which are likely to rely heavily on GPS. (By the same token, GPS hardly works at all indoors - in those cases, your smartphone instead tries to pick up nearby wifi signals to "guess" where you are.) "There are plenty of cases of drivers in built-up urban areas suddenly wishing they had a map," he says. This is particularly a problem for downtown areas. For one, McKinlay notes, signals from these satellites are relatively faint, and can be bounced around by buildings or other structures, messing up the information gathered by GPS receivers. ![]() There are a few kinks in this setup, however. The current configuration of GPS satellites orbiting the Earth. The receiver just needs to pick up at least four signals to trilaterate your position. They were originally put up there by the Department of Defense to aid with military navigation, but can now be accessed freely by anyone in the world with a GPS receiver in their car or phone. The Global Positioning System (GPS) consists of 31 satellites orbiting Earth from 12,550 miles up, transmitting signals as they go. Because satellite navigation can go awry in rather unexpected ways. But McKinlay is interested in those times that it fails. The Google Maps app on our smartphones gets us to where we need to go, and we don't think twice about it. Satellite navigation doesn't always work as well as we like to thinkįor most of us, 99.9 percent of the time, GPS works incredibly well. McKinlay, the former president of the Royal Institute of Navigation, recently wrote an essay for the journal Nature on how "automatic wayfinding is eroding natural abilities." Curious, I called him up to talk more about the pitfalls of relying on GPS, what it's doing to our brains, and whether there are better alternatives. "We've become overdependent," McKinlay says. Worse, our reliance on GPS might be causing our innate navigational capabilities to atrophy over time, leaving us helpless when technology fails and we're forced to orient ourselves. That could become an even bigger problem as we push for driverless cars and other self-navigating vehicles. But stories like this have gotten satellite expert Roger McKinlay thinking about whether we've become too dependent on GPS and other satellite navigation devices - particularly now that so many adults rely on their smartphones rather than their brains to get around unfamiliar territory.įor starters, these devices don't always work as well as we think they do, and can fail in surprising ways. He arrived at Gibraltar Point, England, surrounded by a group of befuddled birdwatchers. He'd meant to go to Gibraltar, off the south coast of Spain. In 2008, a Syrian truck driver was faithfully following his satellite navigation system and ended up 1,600 miles away from where he was supposed to be. ![]()
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