How much better can GPS tracking get?

Well, University of California, Riverside (UCR) researchers believe they have developed a more efficient way to process GPS, improving location accuracy down to a matter of centimeters.

This introduced optimization is so efficient that Jay Farrell, UCR professor and chair of electrical and computer engineering at the school's Bourns College of Engineering, says it will also be used in self-driving cars and that the technology will enable customers to get down to a few centimeters of GPS accuracy, even while using their smartphones and wearable devices.

"To fulfill both the automation and safety needs of driverless cars, some applications need to know not only which lane a car is in, but also where it is in that lane — and need to know it continuously at high rates and high bandwidth for the duration of the trip," Farrell said, as reported by Phys.org.

He added: "Achieving this level of accuracy with computational loads that are suitable for real-time applications on low-power processors will not only advance the capabilities of highly specialized navigation systems, like those used in driverless cars and precision agriculture, but it will also improve location services accessed through mobile phones and other personal devices, without increasing their cost."

The way UCR's strategy works is it reformulates equations used to pinpoint a GPS receiver's location, but it accomplishes that with less computational steps while bringing it closer in accuracy than traditional GPS devices.