German Industrial Robots Turned Aussie GPS Testers

AustraliaIt almost sounds like the beginning of a joke. A German robot goes to the Australian outback and…. enhances its GPS system. That’s right industrial robots, designed by German researchers are going to be making their way to one of the largest stretches of open undeveloped land on the earth, in order to test their skills in location and navigation. The outback was an excellent choice for an obvious reason, few sources of signal interference and limited rain. You really would not want to try this in the middle of the rainforest.

The project is being run as a test of the Global Navigation Satellite System, or GNSS, for short. The Australian government is hoping that my improving the tracking of the bots systems will help with their tracking efforts. The nation is hoping to use this kind of data later on in fields as diverse as tectonic research, where the measurements have to be very precise.

Source: The Register

Image: Morgue File