- cross-posted to:
- Technology
- cross-posted to:
- Technology
cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/35701350
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So it thinks you’re everywhere at once until you look out the window and observe your position?
Does anyone know how much more accurate this is compared to other interferometer gyroscopes like fiber-optics?
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.add3854
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-58381-6
I’m not gonna do the math. But it seems those fiber once have a longer path relatively speaking, so higher latency
This sounds pretty fancy.
Commercial aircraft get their location from multiple places including GPS, ground based facilities (VOR’s), IRS, etc. IRS is what I’m used to calling it, but it’s the same as INS, which is what this article is talking about.
It determines location by keeping track of rotation, acceleration, etc. It’s often called “dead reckoning” because it just gives the best guess, and you don’t know how accurate it is. There are multiple of these devices on each aircraft, and they compare their locations to the other sources and if one is drifting way further than the rest, it gets ignored. That’s a very basic explanation because how it really works is way above my knowledge level.
It’s very cool how these devices find their location, though. When you first boot the system up, it spends about 5 minutes measuring the rotation of the Earth. For this reason, you can’t reset it when in motion. Based on what it feels it can determine your exact location on the surface of the earth.
When you first boot the system up, it spends about 5 minutes measuring the rotation of the Earth. For this reason, you can’t reset it when in motion.
That’s very interesting. I’ve heard a lot about IRS/INS, but I didn’t know what it was doing during initialization.
It must be an extremely sensitive instrument if it can measure the rotation of the Earth. I’m wondering, does anyone in the cockpit have to sit still when it boots up? Because I can imagine walking around in the plane alone, or even just a powerful sneeze would already introduce some movement, not to talk about the ground handlers loading the cargo.
It’s very cool how these devices find their location, though. When you first boot the system up, it spends about 5 minutes measuring the rotation of the Earth. For this reason, you can’t reset it when in motion. Based on what it feels it can determine your exact location on the surface of the earth.
That gets you longitude but not latitude, right?
So it figures out where you are based on vibes?
Hmmm so in the future we will have AI best guessing planes locations? Ye haw.
To be clear, what you’re describing is only true of INS. Other methods do not have these limitations, like GPS constantly receives the satellite signal to place your position.
The article is about a highly accurate (orders of magnitude) INS system.
A beacon in the warp….
