Commercial use of GPS

1
Commercial use of GPS

• Bruce Peetz
• VP Technology, Trimble
• 14 March 2008

2
Trimble Overview

• Survey
• Machine Control
• Construction Instruments

Engineering Construction

• Agriculture
• Mapping GIS

Field Solutions

• Fleet Tracking
• Mobile Worker Productivity

Mobile Solutions

• Embedded GPS Products
• Timing
• Inertial Systems

Advanced Devices
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What motivates the commercial use of GPS?

• Efficiency
• Does it save money and time?
• Does it allow more work to be done?
• Stability
• If I invest in this today, will the investment
  premise still be true next year?
• Reliability
• Can I trust this on a day to day basis to give
  the required results?

4
Efficiency

• If the basic signals are provided by the system,
  then innovation can be (and has been) created by
  commercial enterprise
• Precision GPS equipment can get sub-centimeter
  relative accuracy using signals that only had 10s
  of meters of absolute accuracy in mind

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GPS Efficiency for Agriculture

• 5-25 increase in equipment efficiency arising
  from
• Faster and more accurate coverage of land tilled
  by previous methods
• Ability to till additional acreage with the same
  equipment, leading at low marginal cost

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GPS Efficiency for Agriculture

• Ability to do strip tillage
• Strip tillage placing fertilizer and pesticides
  only on the furrow where the seed goes
• Significant reduction in chemical costs
  noticeable improvement in yield
• Reduced environmental impact of runoff
• Cant be done on a production level without
  precision GPS

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GPS efficiency for Construction staking

• Grade stakes are not needed on this site
  because the machines take their instruction from
  GPS. GPS is changing the way we work
• -Doug McAninch,President, McAninch Corp.

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GPS efficiency for Construction grade control

• We have proven through our experience and
  collecting data over the past five years that GPS
  grade control gives us a 28 to 33 increase in
  productivity. To do it any other way is truly
  archaic. 
• -Tony Clark, Survey Manager and Machine Control
  Technician, M. Hanna Construction, Texas

Locally operated Hawaiian grading project
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GPS efficiency for Construction rework

• Were completing projects sooner, and weve
  literally cut our rework by 70 by using the GPS
  system.
• -Joey Keiffer, General superintendent, Malphrus
  Construction Company

Bechtel operation at Oak Creek power plant
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Stability

• Policy
• Freely available to all, without user fees
• Dual-use system that recognizes the shared
  equities of civilian and military users
• Signals
• Stable signal specifications allow the time for
  commercial equipment investment to give
  significant returns
• Constellation

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Constellation StabilityComparing GPS and Glonass
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Reliability

• Air Force 2 SOPS is responsible for the
  Operational Control Segment 746 TS is
  responsible for testing control segment element
  testing
• Commercial customers dont know this, because
  they never had a reason to
• Performance standards have always been met, even
  during control segment changeover

Imagine if a cable TV operator ran the system
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To date, all three elements (efficiency,
stability, reliability) have worked well

• We know this because
• Despite the present economy, commercial customers
  are buying increasing amounts of equipment
• Solutions that add yet-to-be-launched capability
  are selling in spite of added costs
• Continued attention to these elements are
  essential to continue the economic progress
  driven by GPS