US ARMY CREATING NEW WAY OF NAVIGATION

The US army is working on limiting its dependence on GPS by developing the next generation of navigation technology  including a tiny autonomous chip. DARPA, the research group behind a range of spy tech and which helped invent the Internet, was also the driving force behind the creation of the Global Positioning System, director Arati Prabhakar said at a press conference. “In the 1980s, when GPS satellites started to become widely deployed… it meant carrying an enormous box around on your vehicle,” she said. “Now it’s got to the point where it’s embedded not just in all our platforms but in many of our weapons,” as well as in many civilian devices, she said.But “sometimes a capability is so powerful that our reliance on it, in itself, becomes a vulnerability,” she added. “I think that’s where we are today with GPS.”Among the fears: the GPS signal could be scrambled by an adversary, as happened recently in South Korea. Starting in 2010 DARPA has been working on a variety of programs aimed at developing new navigation and positioning technology, at first the goal of extending their reach to places where satellite don't work like underwater. Researchers at DARPA and the University of Michigan have created a new system that works without satellites to determine position, time and direction all contained within a eight cubic millimeter chip. The tiny chip holds three gyroscopes, three accelerometers and an atomic clock, which, together, work as an autonomous navigation system. This is shows how much universities today rely on funding from the government and vice versa. The University of Michigan is getting a lot of money to take on this project just like schools all over the US. Stevens maybe the next school to get a big project like that.