From: Eugene Leitl (eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Tue Dec 21 1999 - 03:21:35 MST
Michael M. Butler writes:
> Just try typing aetherwire into your browser. :) www.aetherwire.com.
Thanks to Eternal Power of St. Google I already found them. Very cool stuff.
> Aether Wire & Location is a competitor of Time Domain. I wouldn't call them
> consorts.
Consorts memetically, not economically.
> We'll have to wait & see who can deliver the goods. I think Aetherwire has
> stayed pretty conservative in their claims. Nobody's *there* yet, at least
> in the open literature/industry.
Still, this looks slightly more than vapourware:
http://www.darpa.mil/ato/programs/wv/overview/99overviews/aetherwire.html
<pout>Of course, as usual, the camouflaged ones are always getting a
sneak preview. </pout>
> There seems to be some confusion here. I said "at kilometer range". Given
There is no reason pulse radio stuff wouldn't work on megameter
distances and beyond.
> Earth atmosphere, putting a space infrastructure up in orbit at an altitude
> of a few kilometers seems rather labor intensive, not to mention the
Well, zero-altitude sats in an evacuated diamagnetic pipe around the
Earth _is_ labor and energy intensive ;)
> stratospheric particle load all that ablation would likely create. :)
>
> If you know Time Domain, you know the idea. A gaggle of devices
> cross-locate each other. When I said "no cells", I meant specifically no
Mutual triangulation, very cool stuff. Very old conceptually, but really cool.
> cellphone cells. I thought saying so would be redundant, given context.
But there are cells. You make cells from nodes in the landscape. You
need to span a mesh across the globe, so there's no pure geoautism
involved.
> >Once we have realtime cm resolution everywhere, autonomous robots are
> >going to get quite frisky. Beats machine vision/map construction every
> >time....
>
> I'm afraid I'm old-fashioned: I'd want sensor fusion, multimode stuff like
> machine vision alongside raw positioning. This frisky stuff still has to
Yeah, but you don't need to create _global_ maps from machine
vision. You just have to keep track of enough things not to bump into
anything.
> exist alongside dumb matter for a while yet.
Pshaw! Dumb matter is going to smarten up real quick.
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