WASHINGTON (States News Service) -- The way Rick Fleeter sees it, you should have one everywhere -- on your bike, your stereo, your rare Beatles original LP album cover. Heck, you should even tie one on your kid. Anything valuable.
Fleeter sees a future where cheap Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite receivers are everywhere. And his company, AeroAstro in Herndon, Virginia, is already working to get an edge on the market.
The key to its strategy: pinpointing your location would be as simple as typing in a web address on your home computer.
Civilian, consumer-oriented GPS systems have been around for years, receiving the signals from orbiting satellites and telling their users their location on Earth, sometimes within a couple of yards. But most of those systems are pretty expensive, Fleeter said, and not targeted for a mass market.
The AeroAstro SENS system, now available in a limited fashion, isn't ready for that yet either, Fleeter said, but it's only a couple of years away from wide distribution.
"We have a prototype that's like the size of a Snickers bar," said Fleeter, the company CEO. "The ultimate design would really be the size of a sports watch."
The idea behind SENS (Sensor-Enabled Notification System) is to package ever-cheaper GPS receivers with a sensor that can perform one or maybe two measurements only.
The units would receive GPS signals, and then transmit their own signals to dedicated AeroAstro satellites. That information would be available to clients over the web.
By focusing on narrow use, the company can offer the units cheaply, around $45 each now. By using Web-based access, customers also don't have to pay for expensive specialized receivers.
Possible uses are many, but Fleeter said the company is starting by concentrating on a few industrial markets: airport noise monitoring, chemical plant monitoring and precision agriculture. In all of these cases, each SENS module would be a GPS receiver coupled with some sort of sensing device, such as a soil moisture monitor. Because of the low cost, the customer would be able to scatter hundreds of units around a site, creating a detailed map.
"You get what an engineer calls a field measurement instead of a point measurement," Fleeter said. "The system is set up to put a minimum burden on the uplink."
AeroAstro, which specializes in micro-satellites and cheap, "piggyback" payloads that hitch rides with larger packages on big rockets, is still developing the system.
For now, potential users of the system would have to use a "pseudo-lite" -- a ground-based antenna that would take the place of a satellite -- to get information from the units. The company's next step is to put just two satellites in orbit, enough to service clients who only need data from their SENS units a few times a day.
"One thing I find is that people create these grand plans for satellite constellations and then they don't get any money [from investors]," Fleeter said. "What we said is, let's do something with the small amount of money we have available to get some service up."
The company is counting on the price of GPS chips to keep falling, maybe as low as $10 each, so that by the time AeroAstro places an entire SENS constellation in orbit, it will be able to offer services to a mass consumer market.
"The way we're going, anything that's worth $100, and you're remote from it and want to know what's up with it, this would be worth it to you. That's our goal," Fleeter said.
The great thing about GPS, he said, is that like the World Wide Web itself, it can support near unlimited users.
"That was foremost in our mind when we thought of this," Fleeter said. "We could have a million of these in the field and it wouldn't bother us."
advertisement
