MARKET ANALYSIS FOR THE MICROZED TIMEKEEPING AND GEOLOCATION SENSOR (TGS)
by
BRIAN STRIGEL
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science
Department of Physics
STEP Program
CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY
August 2019 CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES
We hereby approve the thesis/dissertation of
Brian Strigel
candidate for the degree of Master of Science*
Committee Chair
Edward Caner
Committee Member
Corbin Covault
Committee Member
Michael Martens
Date of Defense
June 3, 2019
*We also certify that written approval has been obtained
for any proprietary material contained therein.
ii
Contents
List of Figures ...... v
Abstract ...... vi
Introduction...... 1
II.0. Potential Industrial Applications: Power Grid Synchronization, Microgrids, and
Travelling Wave Fault Detection ...... 7
II.1: Travelling Wave Fault Detection...... 7 II.2 Cost Analysis for Implementation of Microzed TGS in Cleveland, Ohio for TW Fault Detection ...... 13 II.3 ISO/FERC Live Monitoring and the Electricity Market ...... 15 II.4: Speculative Smart Grid Applications ...... 20 II.5: Microgrid Applications ...... 23 II.6: Summary of Potential Applications in the Electric Utility Industry ...... 27 III: Potential Applications in the Department of Defense ...... 29
III.1: GPS-Starved Navigation ...... 29 IV: Other Applications ...... 32
IV.1: Cyber Security ...... 32 IV.2: Internet of Things (IoT) ...... 32 IV.3: Potential Applications in Aviation and Drone Technology ...... 34 IV.4 Microlocation Applications: Live Personnel Tracking and Geofencing Technology ...... 36 V.0 Practical Concerns and Considerations ...... 42
V.1: Speculative Business Model ...... 42 V.2: Areas for Future Development and Testing ...... 43 V.3: Potential Funding Sources ...... 47 V.4 Potential Competitors ...... 49 V.5 Patentability ...... 58 V.6 Disruptive Product ...... 59 VI.0. Conclusion ...... 62
iii
Appendix A: List of Relevant Grant Applications to the MicroZed TGS ...... 64
Low Probability Intercept/Detect (LPI/LPD) Alternative Navigation System Demonstration ...... 64 Handheld Dismount Kit for Persistent, Precision Navigation in GPS-challenged Environments for Military Operations ...... 66 SBIR Phase I: A Robust Indoor Localization System for Mobile Devices ...... 68 Alternative or Redundant Global Positioning System Navigation ...... 70 Redundant Gimbal-less Navigation and Positioning System ...... 72 Innovative Non-GPS Geolocation Technologies for Hand and Remotely Emplaced Munitions ...... 74 Calcium Slow Beam Optical Clock (CaSBOC) ...... 76 PFI:BIC - A Cost-effective Accurate and Resilient Indoor Positioning System ...... 78 Appendix B: MicroZed Board Information ...... 82
Appendix C: Relevant Patents Requiring Translation ...... 85
Bibliography ...... 88
iv
List of Figures
Figure 1Chart illustrating the Annual Solar PV Capacity in MWdc ...... 25
Figure 2 1 The impact of the U.S. Solar Investment Tax Credit (ITC) of 2005 resulted in a boom for annual U.S. Solar installations ...... 25
Figure 3 Expansion of the U.S. Solar Market as a Function of its Declining Cost
...... 26
Figure 4 Example of Sensor Delay Times in Ping Receiving Based on approximate distance to sensors surrounding the building...... 38
Figure 5 MicroZed board. Its compact design can be neatly packaged into a rugged device...... 82
v
Market Analysis for the MicroZed Timekeeping and Geolocation Sensor (TGS)
Abstract
by
BRIAN STRIGEL
This paper presents a survey of possible applications for the MicroZed
Timekeeping and Geolocating Sensor (TGS) developed by Professor Corbin
Covault of Case Western Reserve University and his team. Professor Covault
prototyped the device in 1996 at the Pierre Auger Observatory as a tool to count
cosmic rays in his research and he has continued to develop the device. The paper
investigates possible current markets for the device and considers its patentability.
Markets considered include Box Synchronization for usage in Travelling Wave
(TW) Fault Detection, electric trading markets, the Smart Grid, Microgrids, potential defense applications, Aviation and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technology, Internet of Things, Geofencing, Microlocation, and Microlocation of
Live Rescue Personnel. Although the author concludes that the device may not be patentable, the paper offers insight and a recommended path for the professor to take should he decide to commercialize the device for use in any of the mentioned applications.
vi
Introduction
Case Western Reserve University’s Professor Corbin Covault and his colleagues initially developed the MicroZed Timekeeping and Geolocation Sensor
(TGS) in conjunction with the Pierre Auger Observatory. They developed the device “to allow cross-matching of cosmic ray event times for on-line shower
recognition and off-line direction reconstruction”1 within 10 ns relative timing with live data stream synchronization, all while consuming less than 1 W of power. The
MicroZed TGS was created from off-the-shelf components.
In 1996, when this research was conducted, no such device could apply and self-calibrate to a GNSS ping to required resolution. The Pierre Auger Observatory required a transmission-free atmosphere to conduct its survey on cosmic rays,
requiring the MicroZed TGS to be internally calibrated. Connecting the
prototypical MicroZed TGS to an external timekeeping standard would have
compromised the sensitive instruments in place at the Observatory.
The prototypical MicroZed TGS developed in 1996 produced good results.
According to the report on its design, “The basic technique is to exploit a
commercial GPS receiver module, in conjunction with a custom-designed 100 MHz
twin channel counter latch assembly. These are both interfaced with a computer.”2
The report further described the testing of the prototype to the MicroZed
TGS that was conducted at the Pierre Auger Observatory:
Initially two prototype systems were constructed which were tested under two circumstances a) at the same location and b) separated by 500 m using a high
1 The Auger Collaboration, The Pierre Auger Observatory Design Report (1997) ed. 2 pg. 175-178 2 The Auger Collaboration, The Pierre Auger Observatory Design Report (1997) ed. 2 pg. 175-178
1
bandwidth cable link. The time interval measurement error distribution had a standard deviation of 6 ns, with a systematic error of 5 ns. The maximum errors observed during 8 days of operation, with 800,000 test triggers, were +21 ns and - 35 ns. 3 Twenty-three years later, development on the device has not stopped.
Professor Corbin Covault has readapted the technology to have the device use a
250 MHz oscillator. He has revised the system architecture on a MicroZed board connecting a Xilinx 7000 CPU, Zync PLU, attached oscillator, and counter, so that the device is now an accurate geolocating, timekeeping device suitable for
timestamping asynchronous inputs connected via ‘standard’ BNC connector or
TTL logic pulses. The device receives a 1 pulse per second (PPS) signal from a connected GPS receiver which gates a 250 MHz oscillator whose ticks are counted and assigned sequential integer values. The GPS signal is then latched onto the counter. Then the asynchronous signal inputs will also be received and given their own counting value. The computer will then deduce the exact timing for when the signal was read. This allows the signals to be both timestamped and geolocated to a precise degree, as the CPU and logic gate work to combine the signals. The 1 PPS signal is also meant to continuously calibrate the device to its own internal oscillations rather than being reliant on an external time standard. This gives the device freedom to operate as its own, self-sustainable entity, without the necessity of being connected to either a more precise atomic clock or Ethernet connection.
The device’s internal consistency and reliability, along with its relative affordability, provide benefits to researchers on a tight budget. These factors also potentially open up new markets for the device in various industries that
3 The Auger Collaboration, The Pierre Auger Observatory Design Report (1997) ed. 2 pg. 175-178
2
timekeeping technology has not been able to reach due to the cost and demands on infrastructure of currently available products. The price floor established for the
MicroZed TGS device is between $175 to $200. The device is the approximate width and height of a computer mouse. Thus, this device on the surface is an incredible product because it provides many desirable features of a geolocating and timekeeping device for a comparatively low cost.
Precise timekeeping is currently considered a high-end technology only reserved for a select market within academia and the world’s premier research and governmental institutions that have multi-million-dollar facilities for Rubidium or
Cesium clocks, e.g. the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) or
Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), the National
Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the United States, and the
International Electrical and Electronic Engineer-Standard Association (IEEE-SA), in Europe. These markets have either developed their own timekeeping technology, or use the already-established, traditional atomic clocks for their projects. These institutions perform scientific measurements which require up to femtosecond accuracy. Large governmental agencies setting the standards for every atomic clock in every known industry require timekeeping accuracy far beyond what the
MicroZed TGS can accomplish. The multimillion-dollar cost of traditional,
Rubidium or Cesium clocks are within the budgets of the massive research institutions that already employ them.
MicroZed TGS is too imprecise to be marketable to these traditional users of timekeeping devices. Although the traditionally best buyers of atomic clocks
3
may not provide a market for the device, the device has the potential to open new
markets that require accurate timekeeping, but do not require the femtosecond
accuracy of the institutions described above and/or have budgetary constraints
preventing them from using large, multi-facility clocks. This paper outlines
possibilities for such new markets for the device.
Over the recent years there has been an increase in interest for microlocation devices providing accuracy within the degree of the centimeter. With the inherent
GPS interconnectivity within the MicroZed TGS, this seems like a natural market
for the device, since it also provides an alternative means of providing affordable
time precision. Notable examples of devices already on the microlocation market
include, but are not limited to, Zebra UWB technologies, and the Humatics’s
KinetIQ line of devices. Both the Zebra UWB and KinetIQ microlocation devices
currently use Ultra-Wideband (UWB) indoor location technology to determine the
relative distance of the object in question to a sensor. The UWB, in general, has
developed over the current decade due to the generally higher time resolution
needed than standard GPS-based location systems to account for the greater
possibilities for the materials on the interiors of buildings to block and disburse a
location signal.4 The MicroZed TGS makes up for its relative low resolution,
compared to the higher possible resolutions given by current microlocation market
players, in its affordability. This may open new markets within the field of
microlocation technologies.
4 Abdulrahman Alarifi 1,*, AbdulMalik Al-Salman 2, Mansour Alsaleh 1, Ahmad Alnafessah 1, Suheer Al-Hadhrami 2, Mai A. Al-Ammar 3 and Hend S. Al-Khalifa, UltraWideband Indoor Positioning Technologies: Analysis and Recent Advances, Sensors Vol.16 p. 706, (2016)
4
Another potential market for the MicroZed TGS is for personnel tracking,
particularly for use by emergency service personnel. Worchester Polytechnic
Institute conducted a need analysis of innovative tracking technologies in 2001.
The researchers determined that there is a lack of reliable personnel tracking
systems in an “important application area: a system for rapidly deployable position determination and tracking of personnel, particularly emergency service personnel over relatively short ranges of emergency response operations . . ., but with high precision and reliability in an unprepared and radio unfriendly environment.”5 The
researchers further determined that:
Development of a deployable operations-scale capability is important for at least two reasons: (1) it will greatly increase emergency response efficiency, improving results with limited human resources, and (2) it will provide a quantum step increase in personal safety and recovery of responders.6
In addition, there may be industrial applications for the MicroZed TGS. The
device’s compact computer chip is accurate enough for usage in industrial applications ranging from power grid synchronization and microgrid management to Smart Grid cyber security applications.
This paper will describe in detail the potential applications in the marketplace for the MicroZed TGS. Section II will explore the potential usage of this device within the proposed markets; Section III will discuss any potential applications relating to usage by the United States Department of Defense; Section
5 John A. Orr, David Cyganski, Firefighter and other Emergency Personnel Tracking and Location Technology for Incident Response: Concepts and Requirements (July 11, 2001) 6 John A. Orr, David Cyganski, Firefighter and other Emergency Personnel Tracking and Location Technology for Incident Response: Concepts and Requirements (July 11, 2001)
5
IV will identify any other possible applications that were not discussed in the previous sections; Section V will discuss the practical considerations such as areas needed for future research, potential grant sources, business modelling and any other practical or philosophical considerations relating to the MicroZed TGS, and any potential competitive products related to the MicroZed TGS in development that could potentially be adapted for the target market; and Section VI provides the conclusion.
6
II.0. Potential Industrial Applications: Power Grid Synchronization, Microgrids, and Travelling Wave Fault Detection
II.1: Travelling Wave Fault Detection
The United States has been trying to improve its aging power grid ever since the massive power outage that started in Cleveland, Ohio in August 2003. The cascading outage disrupted millions of homes and prompted interest in rebuilding the nation’s decaying electrical infrastructure. According to some estimates, the massive outage had a “total impact on U.S. workers, consumers, and taxpayers
[that] will be a loss of approximately $6.4 billion”7 in one day. The Final Report
on the August 14, 2003 Blackout in the United States and Canada written by the
U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force report stated that “the outage
affected an area with an estimated 50 million people and 61,800 megawatts (MW)
of electric load.”8
A report on the outage published by Mohammed A. Baseer in the Journal of Electrical Engineering states that when transmission lines “are exposed to faults as a result of lightning, short circuits, faulty equipments,[sic] mis operation,[sic] human errors, overload, and aging, many electrical faults manifest in mechanical damages[sic], which must be repaired before returning the line to service.”9 In the
report, Baseer states that detecting and repairing such faults is critical in
7 Anderson, Patrick L., Geckil, Ilhan K., Northeast Blackout Likely to Reduce US Earnings by $6.4 Billion, Anderson Economic Group (February 2003) 8 U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force, Final Report on the August 14, 2003 Blackout in the United States and Canada: Causes and Recommendations (April 2004) 9 Baseer, Mohammed, Travelling waves for finding the fault location in transmission lines, Journal Electrical and Electronic Engineering 2013; 1(1): 1-19
7
maintaining a reliable power system. He describes a travelling wave (TW) fault as
follows:
When a fault occurs on a transmission line, the voltage at the point of fault suddenly reduces to a low value. This sudden change produces a high frequency electromagnetic impulse called the travelling wave (TW). These travelling waves propagate away from the fault in both directions at speeds close to that of light. To find the fault, the captured signal from instrument transformers has to[sic] be filtered and analyzed using different signal processing tools. Then, the filtered signal is used to detect and locate the fault. It is necessary to measure the value, polarity, phase, and time delay of the incoming wave to find the fault location accurately. 10 Numerous academic papers have investigated possible methods of detecting
TW faults more accurately. For example, a paper published by University of
Kansas researchers concluded that, “New generation technologies instead of existing ones should be developed and installed for the faster failures identification and clearness to prevent the electrical system from blackouts. The faster disconnection of monitored part of system also as faster regulating systems start- up could be initiated as the element of fault clearness conception in the transmission network.”11 Numerous solutions to TW management and fault detection have been proposed and are currently being explored based upon measuring the timing of varying inputs of electrical signals received at the buses [endpoints of the electric current before it becomes diverted to the end user].1213 V. Siozinys proposed to fix
10 Baseer, Mohammed, Travelling waves for finding the fault location in transmission lines, Journal Electrical and Electronic Engineering 2013; 1(1): 1-19 11 Siozinys V., Urinezius, R., Transmission Fault Line Protection and Fault Location Based on Travelling Wave Measurement, Univ. of Kansas, ELEKTRONIKA IR ELEKTROTECHNIKA, ISSN 1392-1215, VOL. 19, NO. 9, 2013 12 Zewen, Li, et. al., Wide area traveling wave based power grid fault network location method, International Journal of Electrical Power & Energy Systems, Vol. 63, December 2014, Pages 173- 177 13Marx, Steven, Johnson, Brian K., et. al., Traveling Wave Fault Location in Protective Relays: Design, Testing, and Results, (May 6–7, 2013)
8
busses along the grid to measure fixed timestamps so that the “distance to the fault
would be proportional to difference of time value. The error of the method depends
on precision of relay internal timer synchronization and known line length. The fast and separated communication channel between relay protection devices could be used for method realization.”14 From this, the relay’s eigenvectors could be imputed to deduce the travelling waves’ relevant impedance and voltage from the equation:
15 ( ) = ( ) −1 𝑑𝑑 𝐈𝐈 𝑠𝑠 𝐓𝐓𝑖𝑖 𝐂𝐂𝑓𝑓𝐓𝐓𝑢𝑢 𝐔𝐔 𝑠𝑠 𝑑𝑑𝑑𝑑 I, T, and U correspond to the relevant Impedance, Time delay, and Voltage eigenvector, respectively. Cf refers to the phase capacitance of the signal the final bus received. The voltage is a linear relation between the transmission line distance of incident bus and the capacitance of the final bus. Index s refers to the eigenvector of the propagated wave, f refers to final, i specifies the eigenvector of the time delay due to the recorded variance in current, and u refers to the eigenvector of the time delay due to the recorded variance in voltage. By incorporating travelling waves,
the induced voltage can be determined via the following equation:
16 ( ) = 0,5 · ( ) ( ) + 0,5 · ( ) ( ) ( ) −1 𝐔𝐔 𝑠𝑠 𝐙𝐙𝐵𝐵 𝑠𝑠 𝐈𝐈 𝑠𝑠 𝐙𝐙𝐵𝐵 𝑠𝑠 𝐙𝐙𝐵𝐵𝐵𝐵 𝑠𝑠 𝐔𝐔 𝑠𝑠
14 Siozinys V., Urinezius, R., Transmission Fault Line Protection and Fault Location Based on Travelling Wave Measurement, Univ. of Kansas, ELEKTRONIKA IR ELEKTROTECHNIKA, ISSN 1392-1215, VOL. 19, NO. 9, 2013 15 Siozinys V., Urinezius, R., Transmission Fault Line Protection and Fault Location Based on Travelling Wave Measurement, Univ. of Kansas, ELEKTRONIKA IR ELEKTROTECHNIKA, ISSN 1392-1215, VOL. 19, NO. 9, 2013 16 Siozinys V., Urinezius, R., Transmission Fault Line Protection and Fault Location Based on Travelling Wave Measurement, Univ. of Kansas, ELEKTRONIKA IR ELEKTROTECHNIKA, ISSN 1392-1215, VOL. 19, NO. 9, 2013
9
The subscript, (s), denotes the parameters as an eigenvector. ZBE(s)
represents the eigenvector of the incident bus and ZB(s) corresponds to the
eigenvectors of any other busses on the grid affected by any impedance differentials
caused by the travelling wave fault. This application requires precise time
measuring, and any differentials greater than a few milliseconds could result in
incorrect measurements of the travelling fault.
In 2017, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the
International Electrical and Electronic Engineer-Standard Association (IEEE-SA) conducted a workshop to gather inputs from stakeholders and industry players to
identify, analyze, and provide guidance on technologies, standards and
methodologies for addressing the practical timing challenges that are currently
being experienced in wide area time synchronization. The concerns addressed
problems in electrical-industrial applications and in the development of the smart
grids, and the necessity of addressing TW faults in the power industry in America
and in Europe.17 One challenge mentioned was about improving and creating a verification system for the timing systems currently used within the electric grid.
Another challenge is how the system can overcome discontinuities in timing and other errant activities.18 Finally, perhaps the most relevant challenge mentioned concerned TW Fault Detection, about which the conference document stated
[TW fault detection] requires synchronization on the order of hundreds of nanoseconds in order to precisely locate a fault to the scale of hundreds of feet as the electricity waves are traveling at near the speed of light. When an event occurs between two traveling wave fault detectors, the anomalous waves are time-
17NIST, Timing Challenges in the Smart Grid, Special Publication No. 1500-08 (January 2017) 18NIST, Timing Challenges in the Smart Grid, Special Publication No. 1500-08 (January 2017)
10
stamped. Comparing the timestamps between the two detectors provides information on the fault location.19
To properly monitor the timestamps, substantial geo-location network
protocols over the local area network (LAN) in the order of microseconds will be required. These signals require monitoring sent and received timestamped signals that synchronize their communication latencies. System transience, such as weather events, requires a particularly rapid response. The report explains that the time latency tolerance of the system, while variable due to varying control schemes imposed on the grid, should be expected to be on the order of milliseconds.
“Measurements messages are received on the order of once every 16.7 ms for reporting rates of 60 messages per second in PMUs. Volatility of generation
sources and the ability to aggregate measurements and compute states are estimated
on the order of 100 ms for real-time applications.”20 The required hundreds of nano-
and millisecond accuracy would be well within the capabilities for the MicroZed
TGS to sort through all of the varying signals put upon the grid to detect minor
disturbances.
Current methods for TW fault detection already use GPS-attached receivers receiving multiple signals at once to triangulate an electric impulse. The most common method of TW fault detection “uses an idea of multiple registration of travelling wave propagated from fault. The travelling waves reflect from substation busses due to significant difference of wave impedance.”21 This is possible because
19 NIST, Timing Challenges in the Smart Grid, Special Publication No. 1500-08 (January 2017) 20 NIST, Timing Challenges in the Smart Grid, Special Publication No. 1500-08 (January 2017) 21 Baseer, Mohammed, Travelling waves for finding the fault location in transmission lines, Journal Electrical and Electronic Engineering 2013; 1(1): 1-19
11
the “reflected travelling wave from [the] bus bar propagate towards [the] fault and
[will] reflect as well, due to difference of wave impedance. [As] [p]ropagated
[waves move] towards [the] bus bar travelling wave repeatedly are recorded. After
that the distance from the buses to the fault could be calculated. The distance would
be proportional to difference between time stamps of nearby registrations.”22
The reliance of the two travelling waves’ impedance and ability to interfere
with each other destructively can allow “two travelling waves propagated towards
busses [to be] registered. The second wave is refracted at the fault, so if the line
length [has a] high significant error [the TW Fault detection] could be
encountered.”23 With high possible error, the current methods in TW Fault
detection need a high accuracy resolution in signal registration in the hundreds of
nanoseconds. The MicroZed TGS is fully capable of synchronizing and monitoring
wave pulses from the travelling busses at the required resolution and it can more
reliably account for this error and measure distances of pings based on time
received and its location.
In summary, Micro Zed TGS offers a solution to handle the errors in TW
diffraction and detection. The device could permit power companies’ computers to
act appropriately based on reliable data. The product’s strength in geolocation and
timestamping communication signals easily matches the required hundreds of
nanosecond accuracy the industry theoretically demands.
22 Baseer, Mohammed, Travelling waves for finding the fault location in transmission lines, Journal Electrical and Electronic Engineering 2013; 1(1): 1-19 23 Baseer, Mohammed, Travelling waves for finding the fault location in transmission lines, Journal Electrical and Electronic Engineering 2013; 1(1): 1-19
12
II.2 Cost Analysis for Implementation of Microzed TGS in Cleveland, Ohio for TW Fault Detection
This section provides an example of a cost-benefit analysis for adding
MicroZed TGS to each electrical power breaker in the City of Cleveland, Ohio, for
use in TW Fault Detection. The analysis is based upon a rough estimation of the
number of electrical power boxes in use in the City of Cleveland, as determined by
the United States Census of 2010. Then, a formula is applied to that number to
estimate the average electric rate each household on the power grid would
experience to pay for adapting this change in a month. Implementation would be
over many months. However, it may be safe to assume it will happen over one
month for purposes of this analysis.
The United States Census counted approximately 171,000 households in the
statistical area of Cleveland in 2010.24 With an estimated average 12 households
for every city block,25 via dimensional analysis implies that there are approximately
amount of fourteen thousand blocks in the city of Cleveland. Assuming that blocks
are arranged as a grid26 would imply that there are roughly four blocks affected by every power bus.27 While this will overestimate the number of busses, i.e. breaker
24 US Census Data for Cleveland, OH, Census Reporter, https://censusreporter.org/profiles/16000us3916000-cleveland-oh/ Date Last accessed: May 2, 2019 25 Can vary wildly from many buildings tightly packed on all four roadsides to large buildings occupying a single block, this paper assumes 12 to be an average, with four buildings on each side of the road. 26 Grid in this context implies a perpendicular arrangement of streets and roads. While inaccurate for the entirety of the city, there are large sections of the city arranged to be grids. Especially around the College Circle neighborhood, and out towards the suburbs, the neighborhoods appear more uneven. Downtown and the neighborhoods surrounding are roughly gridded with the exception of Lake Erie bordering the north of the city at a diagonal. 27 Actual coverage may vary due to block shape, size, and how other roads are connected. If a perfect grid model is assumed, then the number of blocks is determined by the formula: ( 1)( 1). Where rw refers to how many horizonal roads (east-west) and rh how many vertical roads (north- 𝑟𝑟𝑤𝑤 − 𝑟𝑟ℎ − 13
boxes, within the city, it may provide a high price range for the city’s power company, First Energy.
The number of busses determined from this model is approximately 3 thousand busses in the city of Cleveland using dimensional analysis with a rate of
4 blocks per bus. If the developers sell the MicroZed TGS to First Energy for $200 each, then the cost of the devices alone would be $650,000. Assuming that it would take three workers at a wage of $20 per hour each and three hours to install the device in each box, the installation cost would be $585,000. The total personnel cost would be a little over 1083 manhours to install the MicroZed TGS system into all the boxes. In addition, during installation, power would need to be turned off locally around each bus so costs relating to disabling service while the devices are installed could add up to another $0.3 to $1.4 million for the company, dependent on how many blocks will temporarily lose service during installation.28 Thus, the total expense to install the devices could be anywhere from $0.8 to $2.2 million for the company.
This seems an enormous expense for the company. The following formula can be used to determine if projected revenue would warrant incurring the expense:
Total Revenue Requirement = Rate Base × Allowed Rate of Return + Expenses29
south) there are in a given road grid. From that, take the square root of their product and add 1 due to the fact that a single block must have coverage, and allows for a grid of 4 boxes to affect 9 blocks. 28 0.11 dollars/h x 1083 manhours x 3250 blocks = $387,000 costs. This paper assumes an average $0.11/MWh in energy consumption. 29 Girouard, Coley, Advanced Energy Perspectives, How Do Electric Utilities Make Money?, web article: https://blog.aee.net/how-do-electric-utilities-make-money Date Published: April 23, 2015, Date last accessed: May 2, 2019
14
As a set expense per month, the addition of the MicroZed TGS application
would simply add to the company’s expenses and therefore raise the total revenue
requirement to maintain profitability. The equation implies that a temporary rate
hike likely would more than pay for the expenditure, but additional data is required
to make that determination. Considering that First Energy has unveiled plans to
invest billions30 in updating its local power grids, the expenditure to install the
MicroZed TGS on its boxes is a metaphorical drop in the barrel. To pay for the
MicroZed TGS would only require a 10% rate hike in prices over a month assuming
that the average household in Ohio is paying $105 per month on electricity.31
Consumers in Cleveland would expect to pay $11 more on their bill if the
installation costs were to be paid off that month, less so over longer time periods,
and even less if the cost was spread out over customers outside of Cleveland.
II.3 ISO/FERC Live Monitoring and the Electricity Market
This section will explore a potential market for the MicroZed TGS for both live monitoring of electric loads within a grid and for the financial bidding that occurs with the market players, e.g. power companies, private investors, governmental regulatory agencies (FERC), and the Independent System Operators
(ISOs), etc. While the MicroZed TGS may ultimately be too precise for this
application, the market presents alternative avenues of exploration that are currently
30 First Energy, FirstEnergy Announces Transformational $2.5 Billion Equity Investment, news article: https://www.firstenergycorp.com/content/fecorp/newsroom/news_articles/firstenergy- announces-transformational--2-5-billion-equity-inves.html Date Published: January 22,2018, Date last accessed: May 2, 2019 31 Electricity Local, Ohio Comprehensive Energy Guide web fact sheet, https://www.electricitylocal.com/states/ohio/ Date Last Accessed: May 2, 2019
15
in development for the smart grid and future technologies that have yet to
materialize. With the current state of the power grids in the United States following
the 2003 blackout,32 it could be decades before there is a viable market requiring
nanosecond timestamping technology. However, despite the market’s premature
state to handle such a device, exploration of how the market currently works will
be of benefit. Such exploration can establish the context of the structure of finances
of the electrical trading market, giving insight on where a potential market for the
device in this industry could lie.
The current electricity market revolves around allocating the correct
electrical demand for the end users. The ISO, an independent regulatory body,
monitors the power consumption flow of electricity between plants and end
consumers.33 ISOs are non-governmental and operate over small, non-federally regulated power grids in the United States. Not all power grids are under their own
ISO, but the unregulated free trading market is where the buying and selling occurs.
Buyers and sellers interested in purchasing energy stock are interested in the locational marginal pricing (LMP) for each major node along the transmission system. The LMP is essentially the marginal price for every megawatt (MW) of energy received at a node of the power transmission system, whether it be from the end user, or from a power generator. Each node is connected by a system of transmission lines where the electricity flows. The impedance of the lines forces the electric flow from each node to be uneven, resulting in lines of uneven traffic.
32 United States Department of Energy Department of Electricity, 10 Years after the 2003 Northeast Blackout, web article, https://www.energy.gov/oe/articles/10-years-after-2003-northeast-blackout (August 14, 2013) 33 Case Western Reserve, Electricity Market Workshop October 2018
16
Not every line can handle the load of electricity flowing through it. To
accommodate for this, each node will have to give a differing output of energy. A
complicating factor is that some energy generation sources cannot be turned off;
doing so would cost extra money, some have a minimum power generation output,
requiring that some power plants work below their minimum generation, taking
heavy losses, or perhaps during times of peak generation, requires extra
expenditures to run beyond the capabilities of the individual facilities.34
Managing all the above limiting factors contributes to a differing LMP at
each node. It is the responsibility of the ISO to manage these outputs constantly at
every breaker, and at every power source to maximize efficiency, minimize traffic,
loads on transmission lines based on their impedance, and LMPs at each node. If
the LMP becomes too great due to running too much or too little, then electric
services will become unreliable. This could lead to blackouts within the regional
power grid, and customers and the ISO could incur heavy losses.35
The ISO and market players, e.g. governmental regulatory bodies and individual power plants, conduct trading over this management of uneven power distribution every day, throughout the day based on the changing LMPs in a city.
If there is an uneven change in LMP between nodes, the transmission line operators can generate revenue for providing access to a critical transmission line. They are regulated by the ISO, but the transmission operators ensure that the transmissions line loads are not too small for times around peak demand. The ISO creates a
34 Case Western Reserve, Electricity Market Workshop October 2018 35 Case Western Reserve, Electricity Market Workshop October 2018
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baseline Day-Ahead (DA) prediction for power generation by all connected power
plants on the grid, and then compares it with the Real-Time (RT) output generation
measurements. The DA is created using “a mixture of wavelet transform, linear
AutoRegressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) and nonlinear neural network models.” 36 From that, DA prediction will then guess the probability of a
usage spike, and finally, combining the usage spike predictions will create the
overall electricity price forecast, which in turn sets a price for the DA predictions.
The RT measurement is summed up after a period of 5 minutes, which is
considered glacial compared to the resolution TGS can achieve. If the RT
measurement is above the DA prediction, the market players make a profit.
Likewise, if the RT is below the DA prediction, then the market players would sell
their stock in their energy portfolio. Bids on energy are slow enough for individual
bidders to bid alongside power companies, ISO, and other large market players with
automated bidding algorithms. Because transactions are currently conducted
online, there is interest among market players to adapt their traditional, forum-based
trading into blockchain technology for even faster negotiation between market
players and the ISO.37 However, right now, serious implementation of blockchain energy trading is limited or nonexistent. Blockchain trading is predicted to struggle as the realities of cryptocurrencies are showing signs of struggle;38 as a result, larger
36 Voromin, Sergei, Partanen, Jarmo, Price Forecasting in the Day-Ahead Energy Market by an Iterative Method with Separate Normal Price and Price Spike Frameworks, Energies 2013, 6, 5897-5920; doi:10.3390/en6115897 37 Case Western Reserve, Electricity Market Workshop October 2018 38 Forbes Magazine, Castillo, Michael del. Web article, The Future Of Blockchain: Fintech 50 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeldelcastillo/2019/02/04/top-crypto-blockchain-fintech- companies/#6da9f4b46a9c Date published: Feb 4, 2019, Date last accessed: May 2,2019
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trading institutions are less likely to adapt to using such new technology.
Blockchain technology would require much faster time keeping than the
millisecond accuracy the internet is currently capable of and geolocation on energy
generation would help refine the DA assessments.39
There could be a potential application for the MicroZed TGS in the
monitoring of RT assessments. The MISO40 Supply Surplus Emergency
documentation and the MISO Reliability Data Specifications for monitoring
system-wide status of individual breakers and measuring power generation
readings from each plant on the power grid are updated every 2 seconds to compile
a 5 minute 'real-time' generation report for trading based on the Day-Ahead predictions.4142 The comparison between generation reports versus their daily prediction forms the backbone of how they derive revenue.
Travelling power signals from breakers a hundred miles away will receive a signal from said breakers every few milliseconds, while those much closer could arrive at the breakers in nanoseconds. Since they only require a resolution of two milliseconds, having a device accurate to the millisecond would only be needed for system-wide monitoring. MicroZed TGS is too accurate and too expensive for this application in the current power industry. A complete restructuring of the device
would be required for it to provide a less precise resolution and therefore be more
39 Case Western Reserve, Electricity Market Workshop October 2018 40 Midcontinent Independent System Operator, the ISO operating over Ohio region of the US. Their homepage lists the Real-Time power consumption across their power grid. Their homepage is https://www.misoenergy.org/ last accessed May 2, 2019. They preside over the electric grids of 15 US States and Ontario, Canada. 41 MISO Energy, Resource Availability and Need Issues Statement Whitepaper (March 30, 2018) 42 MISO Energy, RTO-SPEC-006 MISO Reliability Data Specification Ver 6. (October 3, 2018)
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affordable and appropriate to the demands of the market. The device would
essentially need to be rebuilt. Therefore, a market for the device in such markets
can only be accessed after a significant investment and further research into
restructuring the components of the device.
II.4: Speculative Smart Grid Applications
This section will look at the electrical grid development that came as a result
of the 2003 blackout, looking for applications in this technology for the MicroZed
TGS. The federal report on the 2003 blackout listed one of the causes of the
cascading failures as the “failure of the interconnected grid’s reliability
organizations to provide effective real-time diagnostic support.”43 Legislation that tightened the regulatory standards for utility companies arose as a direct result of the large blackout. Scientific American, in a later investigative look on the progress of the American electrical grid five years after the disaster, reported that “prior to the blackout, the North American Electricity Reliability Council (NERC) set voluntary standards. In the wake of the blackout report, Congress passed the Energy
Policy Act of 2005, which expanded the role of the Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission (FERC) by requiring it to solicit, approve and enforce new reliability standards from NERC, now the North American Electricity Reliability
Corporation.”44
43 U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force, Final Report on the August 14, 2003 Blackout in the United States and Canada: Causes and Recommendations (April 2004) pg.81 Chapter 6 44 United States Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, online timeline, https://www.ferc.gov/industries/electric/indus-act/reliability/blackout.asp Date last accessed: 5/2/2019, last updated March 5, 2011
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Federal interest in developing and transforming the American power system
resulted in legislation. Talk has included adding in Smart technology, i.e. the fiber
optic network, to the power grid, microgrids from homeowners producing home
power. According to the NERC filings sent to Congress in 200645 and later, legislators proposed legislation to tighten standards and establish a framework to
transform the American power grid so a disaster like in 2003 would not happen
again. Then in 2009, “further legislation was created to promote investment in new
smart grid devices and overall grid modernization activities occurred via the
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which dedicated $4.5 billion
in government funds (matched by private funding to total $9.5 billion) to increase
the reliability and resiliency of the U.S. power system.” 46 Having federal money
available means that research to modernize the grid is set and therefore creates a
demand for technologies that could implement the MicroZed TGS, which in turn
will create a market for the device.
In 2011, the legislation turned into the development of the smart grid as
fiber optic technology began to emerge and challenge the existing infrastructure.47
This encouraged the US Government adopt a Smart Grid: an interconnected hybrid
power grid of both fiber-optics, power lines from major facilities, and allows for
45 United States Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, online timeline, https://www.ferc.gov/industries/electric/indus-act/reliability/blackout.asp Date last accessed: 5/2/2019, last updated March 5, 2011 46 United States Department of Energy Department of Electricity, 10 Years after the 2003 Northeast Blackout, web article, https://www.energy.gov/oe/articles/10-years-after-2003-northeast-blackout (August 14, 2013) 47 United States Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, webpage on ELECTRICITY GRID MODERNIZATION: Progress Being Made on Cybersecurity Guidelines, but Key Challenges Remain to be Addressed, //www.ferc.gov/industries/electric/indus-act/smart- grid.asp?csrt=15168846559811749772, Date last accessed: May 2, 2019, last updated April 10, 2019
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individual homes to generate power via renewable resources. Title XIII of the
Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 requires that the Smart Grid satisfy
the following characteristics:
1. increased use of digital information and controls technology to improve reliability, security and efficiency of the electric grid 2. dynamic optimization of grid operations and resources, with full cyber-security; 3. deployment and integration of distributed resources and generation, including renewable resources; 4. development and incorporation of demand response, demand-side resources, and energy efficiency resources; 5. deployment of "smart" technologies (real-time, automated, interactive technologies that optimize the physical operation of appliances and consumer devices) for metering, communications concerning grid operations and status, and distribution automation; 6. integration of "smart" appliances and consumer devices; 7. deployment and integration of advanced electricity storage and peak-shaving technologies, including plug-in electric and hybrid electric vehicles, and thermal storage air conditioning 8. provision to consumers of timely information and control options; 9. development of standards for communication and interoperability of appliances and equipment connected to the electric grid, including the infrastructure serving the grid; and 10. identification and lowering of unreasonable or unnecessary barriers to adoption of smart grid technologies, practices, and services.
Numbers (1), (2), (5), (7), (8), (9) will require all precise measures in geolocation
tagging within the capabilities of TGS. The public website explained that
Smart Grid technologies offer a new solution to the problem of monitoring and controlling the grid's transmission System. New technologies called Phasor Measurement Units (PMU) sample voltage and current many times per second at a given location, providing a snapshot of the power System at work. PMUs provide a new monitoring tool for the Smart Grid. In our current electric grid, measurements are taken once every 2 or 4 seconds, offering a steady-state view into the power System behavior. Equipped with Smart Grid communications technologies, measurements can be taken many times a second, offering dynamic visibility into
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the power System. This makes it easier to detect the types of oscillations that led to the 2003 blackout.48
However, with the increased demand for networking, fiber optic connectivity at the speed of light, the need for fine time and signal geolocation and synchronization will be required. With the added requirements needed to a complete transformation of the American power grid, it is no wonder it has yet to materialize a decade later.
II.5: Microgrid Applications
In addition to demands for the government to build a Smart Grid, residential and business consumers across the country are considering producing their own energy from renewable sources such as solar technology. Consumers can sell any surplus energy generated directly to power companies, so these consumers create a sustainable microgrid within a city’s larger power grid. Falling prices for solar panels and their rising popularity, as illustrated in Figure 1,49 fueled and incentivized by state and federal government, have brought an added demand on this market. This is occurring both in America and abroad. For example, some estimates predict that the solar market in Australia could double this year.50
However, due to the astonishing rises in the technology, governments in both
48 U.S. Department of Energy Department of Electricity Delivery & Energy Reliability, Smart Grid Homepage, https://www.smartgrid.gov/the_smart_grid/operation_centers.html, date last accessed: May 2, 2019 49 Solar Energy Industries Association, Solar Industry Research Data, website, https://www.seia.org/solar-industry-research-data Last accessed: 5/2/2019, 50 Zhou, Namaan, The Guardian, Australia's solar power boom could almost double capacity in a year, analysts say, online news article, https://www.theguardian.com/australia- news/2018/feb/11/australias-solar-power-boom-could-almost-double-capacity-in-a-year-analysts- say Date accessed: May 2,2019, published February 11, 2018
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Australia and California have considered supply tariffs. There are already several
Feed-In Tariffs set in California51 and in Australia52 to establish regulatory
standards of selling surplus energy to the utilities companies. The following charts
are there to illustrate the current, and explosive growth and the declining costs in
the in the solar energy market as a result of legislation design to promote its usage
in all contexts (whether it be residential, commercial, and industrial). Essentially,
with the current federal legislation set in place, the solar market is set to continue to expand. It will therefore require more demand for microgrid networks to regulate the increase of excess power generated on a microgrid. With the greater need to
regulate comes the need to synchronize and geolocate thousands of signals across
a power grid.
51 Ferguson, Patrick and Sultan, Tayiha, California Feed-in-Tariff Program that Promotes Renewable Energy Procurement (Re-MAT) Found To Be Unconstitutional, Energy and Enviromnetal Law blog, Davis Wright Tremaine, LLP., https://www.energyenvironmentallaw.com/2017/12/20/california-feed-in-tariff-program-that- promotes-renewable-energy/ Date last accessed: February 2, 2019, Date Published: December 20, 2017 52 Parliament of Australia. https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/Br owse_by_Topic/ClimateChangeold/governance/domestic/national/feed Last reviewed 2 June, 2011 by the Parliamentary Library Web Manager Date last accessed: May 2,2019
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Figure 1Chart illustrating the Annual Solar PV Capacity in MWdc
Figure 2 1 The impact of the U.S. Solar Investment Tax Credit (ITC) of 2005 resulted in a boom for annual U.S. Solar installations
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Figure 3 Expansion of the U.S. Solar Market as a Function of its Declining Cost The International Energy Agency reported in its 2018 report, that
“electricity demand rose by 4%, nearly twice as fast as overall energy demand, and at its fastest pace since 2010. Renewables and nuclear power met the majority of the growth in demand.”53 And as shown via Figures (1), (2) and (3) the increasing demand from legislation and from consumers who are continuing to opt for producing their own renewable energy will cause stress on the existing infrastructure to handle the increased demand. Establishing the proper redundancy system to take on and allow a framework that could lessen the tariffs via strategic gating of selling surplus power to the utility company would require a time synchronization device that can manage both nanosecond conversions of electricity and their geolocation. A device that is small and compact and that can be adapted to read from whatever technology necessary is an excellent candidate for this task.
The MicroZed TGS timekeeping device could potentially allow for the synchronization of travelling impulses from the smaller microgrid into the larger one. This would provide a smoother, less intensive, transition demanding fewer
53 IEA, Global Energy & CO2 Status Report 2018, March 2019
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resources on the part of the utilities provider so that the provider could therefore buy the energy from the consumer for a better rate.
The Department of Energy reports that, “In the United States, the power system consists of more than 7,300 power plants, nearly 160,000 miles of high- voltage power lines, and millions of low-voltage power lines and distribution transformers, which connect 145 million customers.”54 If a MicroZed TGS-based power synchronizer could be in each of the many thousands of power generation facilities across the United States could require tens of thousands of these devices, then the potential revenues of this product could be in the tens of millions, if the product were to sell for approximately $500 each.
II.6: Summary of Potential Applications in the Electric Utility Industry
In summary, all of the aforementioned markets, from Travelling Wave Fault detection, to Smart Grid and electricity trading, are reasonable applications for the
MicroZed TGS, should the development team choose to enter one of these markets.
While promising, the Smart Grid technology with the existing power infrastructure has yet to arise and is still under the beginning phases of adapting to the needed standards. As is, the product is far too accurate and expensive for any immediate usage in the proposed applications in Travelling Wave Fault detection; research time and funding can make it affordable for widespread usage by the utilities companies. Electric market trading is too slow and does not require precise timing
54 United States Energy Information Administration Independent Statistics and Analysis, U.S. electric system is made up of interconnections and balancing authorities, website, https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=27152 Date accessed: May 2, 2019, published: July 20,2016
27
and can be detected already by changes in the frequency of the electricity running through the lines.
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III: Potential Applications in the Department of Defense
III.1: GPS-Starved Navigation
The United States Military is one of the world’s premier research institutions due to the need to be at a technological and therefore tactical advantage over the enemy. In an age of nuclear threats from North Korea, terrorist organizations such as ISIL, and looming fear of a resurgence of the Cold War, the
United States Military is as aggressive as ever at adapting to breakthrough technologies. The MicroZed TGS could be utilized by the Military to give a tactical advantage in novel applications due to its compact size, affordability, and time resolution.
The MicroZed TGS appears to be a prime candidate for applications relating to navigation in GPS-starved environments. Technology in this sector of the navigation market is in its infancy, with only a handful of research companies actively looking at precise tracking devices that function independently from a GPS ping at every node, rather than solely at the hub of operation. In comparison to the many thousands of grants awarded by the Department of Defense, there are a surprising few grants awarded in GPS-starved navigation. Of the approximate
36,000 SIPR and STTR Phase I and II grant awardee search results in the
Department of Defense, a hair over a thousand results appeared relating to GPS going as far back as 1986. A small subset of out ten or fifteen relevant research awards granted within the past five years were related to research involving navigation in GPS-starved environments, with many of the grants being in the past two years. Of those, sever were search results were focused on developing imaging
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systems for real-time unmanned and manned vehicles. Most of the proposals found
were for products and software tangential to the TGS’s primary intended usage
and/or for long distance navigation requiring geolocating stamps of a greater-than-
1km resolution.
Those seven recent and relevant SPIR Grant are listed in Appendix A. Two
of those applications were from the same research corporation, the Toyon Research
Corporation.55 One of them, from AOSense Inc., involved an atomic clock56 for more accurate GPS navigation. Of the seven, the project started by Omnitek
Partners appears to be the most challenging for the MicroZed TGS product. The company submitted a grant to develop a non-GPS munitions detection system involving “embedding [a network of] antennas into the munition ensures that the electronics occupy a volume which is less than 1 cubic inch” to allowing the observer to “periodically monitor the unauthorized movement of the emplaced munition, and thus an accurate map of the emplaced munitions is always available to the host.”57 They mentioned that the spatial precision of their project was less than a meter, which is good, but not necessarily the most ideal.
Grant awardees in the field of GPS research were mostly oriented toward issues for which the MicroZed TGS could readily be used. Therefore, it appears that the Department of Defense may have numerous applications for the device. For
55 SPIR Grant Application, Low Probability Intercept/Detect (LPI/LPD) Alternative Navigation System Demonstration, Contract: N68936-17-C-0067. See Appendix A for copy of their application. 56 SPIR Grant Application, Calcium Slow Beam Optical Clock (CaSBOC) , Contract:W31P4Q-17- C-0109. See Appendix A for a full copy of their application. 57 SPIR Grant Application, Innovative Non-GPS Geolocation Technologies for Hand and Remotely Emplaced Munitions , Contract:W15QKN-17-C-0004. See Appendix A for a full copy of their application.
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example, one application proposed detecting the exact geolocation of active duty soldiers or munitions detection in GPS-starved environments. Based upon grants awarded by the Department of Defense, the United States Military appears to be a market rife with opportunity for the MicroZed TGS to be used.
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IV: Other Applications
IV.1: Cyber Security
Another potential application for the MicroZed TGS could be the
incorporation of the device into various technologies used within the Smart Grid.
With increased demands and interconnectivity on the proposed smart grid, having
the fiber optic infrastructure becoming more ubiquitous, and open Wi-Fi
connectivity from more public locations, people are more vulnerable to threats than
ever before. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has an
open project where “the primary goal is to develop a cybersecurity risk
management strategy for the smart grid to enable secure interoperability of
solutions across different domains and components.58
IV.2: Internet of Things (IoT)
The NIST understands that once the internet is connected to the power grid,
it will expose many cybersecurity risks. This market seems the largest of the three
proposed thus far. The recent development of the Internet of Things (IoT) has
opened a market for timing and network synchronization. IoT commands a market
of $151 billion.59 Because IoT devices can incorporate several sensors at once for immediate accuracy, development of synchronization technologies is imperative for its development. However, the large market evaluation may be large, it leaves
58 NIST, Cybersecurity for Smart Grid Systems, homepage directory, https://www.nist.gov/programs-projects/cybersecurity-smart-grid-systems Date accessed: May 2, 2019 Created November 27, 2012, Updated June 25, 2018 59 Columbus, Louis, Forbes Magazine, web article, 2018 Roundup Of Internet Of Things Forecasts And Market Estimates, https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2018/12/13/2018-roundup-of- internet-of-things-forecasts-and-market-estimates/#407115df7d83 Date published: December 18, 2018 Date last accessed: May 2, 2019
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the opportunity for crashes and may be overstated, as the evaluations did not specify
the definition of what qualified for the market. While the market, currently, is
promising, it could be a bubble and deflate or if the developers commercialize the
MicroZed TGS for an application within its realm there will be bound to be extreme
competition and a high potential to be bought out by a larger electronic systems
developer.
As an example of some of the many applications within the market that
requires precise timekeeping, Intel filed a large patent for TECHNOLOGIES FOR
MANAGING INTERNAL TIME SYNCHRONIZATION (No. US 2019 / 0045475
Feb 2019); among them is a system of connected micro-networks and servers that
relay information through a Local Area Network called the Interconnect. The
Interconnect is “configured to update, in response to having received a broadcast
message from the central timer subsequent to having determined the transport delay
value, a timestamp value of the received broadcast message as a function of the
transport delay value.”60 When listing possible uses for their system, the patent explains that the Interconnect, is a system that couples varying processors together via an external interface for other devices and subsystems. The patent includes a list of possible devices it can connect to includes “sensors, such as accelerometers, level sensors, flow sensors, optical light sensors, camera sensors, temperature sensors, global positioning system (GPS) sensors, pressure sensors, barometric pressure sensors, and the like.61 The Interconnect has managed to internally
60 Intel Corp., TECHNOLOGIES FOR MANAGING INTERNAL TIME SYNCHRONIZATION, US 2019 / 0045475 A1, February 7, 2019 61 Intel Corp., TECHNOLOGIES FOR MANAGING INTERNAL TIME SYNCHRONIZATION, US 2019 / 0045475 A1, February 7, 2019
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regulate itself via pings from other devices connected to it via the IoT devices. The
GPS connection, however, is not internal to the system. The MicroZed TGS could
be developed into a system such as the Interconnect that can transmit and
synchronize signals from varying devices across a wired or wireless network.
Devices in IoT are currently expensive, and if the MicroZed TGS can become more
affordable to the average consumer, to approximately in the $150-200 price range, the MicroZed TGS will have a potential to be competitive in the IoT market as a
component of the myriad of applications. This application may require itself to require patenting, however, which may or may not be possible.
IV.3: Potential Applications in Aviation and Drone Technology
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) appears to be a logical
potential avenue for using the MicroZed TGS for extremely accurate air traffic
monitoring. There are thousands of flights across the US each day, and a single
millisecond of miscommunication can spell doom for over a hundred people on a
passenger flight. However, like the ISO monitoring the real time electric feeds, the
FAA relies on ethernet-based communication, which is sent to a GPS unit and
relayed back to a nearby control center i.e. airport. For smaller aircrafts, their
whereabouts are manually radioed in which can be thousands of times slower.62
Tracking for crashes of small aircrafts is done manually at the craft’s last known
physical whereabouts, which even escalate the resolution as it can take years or
62 FAA, Web article, Introduction to Aeronautical Information (AI), https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/flight_info/aimm/intro_to_ai/ Date last accessed: May 2,2019, Page last modified: October 14, 2015 9:15:47 AM EDT
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even decades to locate the smaller aircrafts. With these time resolutions, the flight monitoring industry would not likely require usage of a device capable of a nanosecond resolution.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), more colloquially known as drones are now used more widely than ever before. Drones have been outfitted for usage in almost every industry, but most have some sort of video recording technology and transmit data back to their host. UAV technology requires ultra-light and compact
technology to minimize costs of operation and for ease of end-user usage. Because
“over 656 thousand drones currently in use and 90% of commercial mapping still
occurs on drone models that cost $1500 or less,63 MicroZed TGS’s affordability and precision could be somehow incorporated in surveying applications. The drone market is forecasted to become a $100 billion industry by 2020 (with approximately
$3 billion in drone sales in 2018), with the lion’s share of the drones in use by the agriculture and construction industry to survey the land.64 The TGS could
incorporate both its GPS ping and accurate timekeeping within a network of drones
to overcome challenges such as greater video detection, computer to computer
communication, or communicating within a network of other drones to steer clear
of other incoming drones. The MicroZed TGS could offer a drones a way to
synchronize signals from multiple drones on the network.
63 Drone Deploy LLC., 2018 Commercial Drone Industry Trends, article, May 30, 2018 64 Goldman Sachs, Drones Reporting for Work, web article, https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/technology-driving-innovation/drones/ Date last accessed: 5/2/2019,
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IV.4 Microlocation Applications: Live Personnel Tracking and Geofencing Technology
An additional application for the MicroZed TGS monitoring system, and albeit perhaps the most promising, would be monitoring active duty firefighting personnel in burning buildings. The competitors mentioned in the introduction i.e.
Zebra Technologies Dart UWB and Humatics KinetIQ devices have industrial applications in mind as their devices are large systems with beacons the size of walkie talkies, making their current technology too cumbersome to carry into a burning building. The Worchester Polytechnic Institute issued a problem statement in 2001, stating that the universal availability of GPS, increasing “role and utility of positioning, navigation, and geolocation systems” and “availability of low-cost, high-capacity, battery-powered processing, storage and display systems” has increased the demand for “a system for rapidly deployable position determination and tracking of personnel, particularly emergency service personnel over relatively short ranges of emergency response operations” while having a “high precision and reliability in an unprepared and radio unfriendly environment.” In addition, the needs assessment continues to explain that the cost of new technology “is often a factor impeding its adoption in budget-constrained environments. Thus a system must be developed that minimizes the cost of the mobile personnel tags.” 65
In more specific terms, they lay the following parameters for the minimum quality standard for such a device to be “rugged and miniature low-power user
65 Worchester Institute of Technology, Firefighter and other Emergency Personnel Tracking and Location Technology for Incident Response, (July 11, 2001)
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equipment with no controls (always on!); portable, rugged, easy-to-use computerized system control unit;” and “self-configuring, fault-tolerant, distributed software systems.” They continue to list even more detailed specifications highlighted in Table 1.
Table 1 Minimum Required Specifications for Personnel Microlocation Technology66 • Location precision: +/- 1 ft • Maximum range: 2000 ft • Simultaneous users: 100 • 3-D position information (multi-level emergencies being common) • Guidance information available to rescue teams • Self-rescue guidance (voice synthesis) • Integration with stored databases: geographic and structural • Backtracking information automatically generated • Small, rugged and very low-cost tag devices • Requires no interaction with wearer during normal use • Integrated with present turn-out equipment • Optional basic physiologic/environmental information capture and transmission
The list, while currently dated was before the development of cloud computing and mobile computing and considering the rise and ubiquity of either, the advent of those technologies can facilitate the development of the device and provide additional means of usage the writers of this survey could not have anticipated. The TGS offers a compact and affordable alternative to the other microlocation technologies, albeit for a somewhat worse 250 MHz resolution.
66 Worchester Institute of Technology, Firefighter and other Emergency Personnel Tracking and Location Technology for Incident Response, (July 11, 2001)
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Figure 4 Example of Sensor Delay Times in Ping Receiving Based on approximate distance to sensors surrounding the building. Because MicroZed TGS is based on a 250 MHz oscillator, it can accurately gauge time signatures to the 10e-7 which is the hundreds of nanosecond range.
Assuming light travels at a constant 3.0e8 m/s, this puts signals going to a source
15-500m squarely within the capabilities of the device as is. It will easily handle buildings of a much larger scale, such as airports or sports stadiums. The original prototype’s tests in 1996 show that the margin of error is well within the needed level of accuracy from a 100 MHz oscillator. The device could potentially be used to triangulate people going across relatively large places like firefighters entering a burning building.
With such a device, firefighters could have their positions tracked in real time and updated every second. The signal would be triangulated between three
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sensors and compiled elsewhere on a different computer, and then the computer
could apply a simple triangulation algorithm illustrated in the above diagram.
Essentially the program would map the three times it takes to the distance of the
source in a radius, and with each of the three taken account of, there should be one
intersection. The computer can then update the user via mobile application or
possibly computer back at the station to monitor the individuals’ location over time.
There would need to be three sensors holding MicroZed TGS, along with a beacon attached to the firefighter, for this application to work. The beacon must be rugged enough to withstand blunt force collisions and high temperatures and operate in a sealed environment safe from smoke. The most rugged industrial SOM for the MicroZed TGS cannot withstand anything greater than 85 degrees
Centigrade, so the beacon must be the only device that the individual carries into the burning building. This implies that the beacon should be a small chip connected inside the firefighters’ uniforms so that it can be shielded from the extreme conditions inside.
Since MicroZed TGS is affordable, and made from off-the-shelf components, the potential for this application seems apt for public sector usage.
Professors at Carnegie Mellon have been developing a solution based on wireless broadband connection for the same result as our device, citing the unreliability of
GPS indoors and the problems due to the hostile environment of a burning building.
MicroZed TGS can succeed because of the ability for this device to use the GPS signal independent of the ping at the firefighter’s end. It just requires the time it takes for a ping to reach the firefighter and return to the sensor.
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There is interest in wearable technology for firefighters due to a lack of
available technology to solve these issues. The solution proposed by developers at
Carnegie Mellon has seen try to connect to an outside network from the inside,
which leads to less accurate results because burning buildings naturally create
obstacles that may lead to imprecise signals. If MicroZed TGS could be
implemented in this area, the sensors would already be externally connected to a
network and would receive active pings from said device.
Marketers have been interested in sending targeted advertising to mobile
devices in a radius. This can prove to be a consuming, expensive operation. This
process, geofencing, can be an avenue for the MicroZed TGS’s success. Patent
US16/168,353 submitted by Geofrenzy Inc. in October 2018, details a method for
the synchronization of geofencing networks using an array of receivers and beacons
sending out and recording the IPs of said beacons.
[0041] The present invention provides methods and systems for querying at least one geofence registered in a database of geofences, with each geofence in the database being associated with a plurality of geographic designators, wherein each of the plurality of geographic designators is associated with an Internet Protocol (IP) address. The data base also includes other relevant information associated with the geofence, such as the owner of the geofence, any licensees of the geofence, a class of the geofence, and more. 67 The system they designed is to accomplish the live tracking and categorization of such pings within the network of devices. The proposed system is planned for uses such as turning off mobile devices while driving, and targeted advertising, that they would license to mobile software developers. The planned method of implementation for these methods is explained as “a computer system,
67 Geofrenzy Inc, Systems and methods for geofence security US16/168,353 (Oct 2018)
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generally described as having a network” connected to “a server and a database.
The server is constructed, configured and coupled to enable communication over a
network with a computing devices.”68 The operating system would enable the server “to communicate through network with the remote distributed user devices.”69 If the TGS were to be adapted to use in such an application as
geofencing the TGS would have to be fitted to an internet server to properly sort
and synchronize messages to the appropriate pings. Some systems could cost
businesses hundreds of thousands of dollars. The MicroZed TGS could be adapted
for usage with this technology and could help lower the cost of these systems.
68 Geofrenzy Inc, Systems and methods for geofence security US16/168,353 (Oct 2018) 69 Geofrenzy Inc, Systems and methods for geofence security US16/168,353 (Oct 2018)
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V.0 Practical Concerns and Considerations
V.1: Speculative Business Model
The following section will describe the commercialization process regarding the MicroZed TGS using the Osterwalder Business Model Canvas. The
MicroZed TGS does not currently have a determined commercial application.
Therefore, some of items my depend on the application the development team will take. For instance, developing the MicroZed TGS for a location tool in personnel tracking would have different key partners and activities, revenue streams, and customer relationships instead of research for adapting the MicroZed TGS into a product usable for Travelling Wave Fault detection.
However, the value proposition should remain the constant for each application: The MicroZed TGS gives affordable precision in signal synchronization. To afford the greatest flexibility in selling the device, the cost structure for selling the MicroZed should be fixed as most customer segments are asking for products in the $100 to $200 range and the device costs approximately
$500 to make. Customer segments across all applications apply to local government, researchers, drone manufacturers, and power industry organizers.
Efforts at licensing may be difficult, considering that the MicroZed TGS is neither patented nor may be able to be patented. The MicroZed TGS may not be licensable to a client city’s local fire department or public safety department because it is unlikely such a client would manufacture the device based upon a license. Adapting this technology into firefighter’s suit may require certification and suits would have to be outfitted with the beacon modules for the device. If the
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TGS were to be adapted to drone technology, then the developers could license the technology to the manufacturer of the drones, likewise to the manufacturer of geofence systems. Key supplies may vary, but at its core for each application the
MicroZed TGS rests at the core of any of the proposed applications. While more
research may be required to develop the system into other devices. Manufacturing
the MicroZed TGS is an issue the development team will need to resolve. Its
resolution rests squarely on its patentability. If the device is not patentable, then the
developers can create their own production facilities and assemble the products in
bulk, but if the device is not patentable, then a third-party manufacturer may be
required.
If the developers of the MicroZed TGS develop it into a microlocation or
synchronization application there should be a program that can monitor each of the
devices separately and we can charge a premium on the software developed to be
run on an external device to record, monitor, or have the user interact with the
MicroZed TGS’s reading. This implies that there needs to be staff to regularly
maintain and update said software and develop it. This would require a significant
investment but should only be considered if the developers should choose to adapt
the MicroZed TGS to a monitoring or detection system, whether it be for fire safety
personnel or TW fault detection.
V.2: Areas for Future Development and Testing
While the MicroZed TGS is rife with possibility to expand into new
markets, the device is unfinished and needs more testing in many different areas.
This section will review several crucial areas that require further testing and/or fine
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tuning if the device is to have commercial viability or be mass-manufactured for sale.
While it is possible to alter the device in such a way so that it can be at the desired time resolution needed for the industrial applications, it will require a complete redesign of the product. To match the accuracy resolution required by the
TW market would require the device to use a slower oscillator, possibly the one that comes preinstalled on the MicroZed board will be suitable. The redesign will force more money and research time to be developed.
The MicroZed TGS device requires more testing for its thermal and physical limits. If this device is to stay on the boxes or sustain itself through large power outages, it will be in contact with high temperatures. Professor Covault noted that the device becomes less accurate as its internal temperature rises, and the electric oscillator begins to become less accurate. Keeping the MicroZed TGS in an insulated container should alleviate this concern.
Another potential area of concern for this product lies in the fact that this device establishes its own time standard as opposed to synchronizing itself with the external atomic clocks at the NIST in the United States or IEEE in Europe. The
NIST currently uses GPSs in conjunction with their cesium and rubidium atomic clocks to calibrate the communication networks,70 which can allow for an external source to be tested against. To run safely and for any potential customer’s trust in the product, the device will still have to be checked and coordinated to meet their
70 Lombardi, Michael A. and Novick, Andrew N., NIST, Remote Time Calibrations via the NIST Time Measurement and Analysis Service, Technical Paper, Vol. 1 No. 4 , December 2006
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standards. Because of the warping the device may experience from temperature or
unanticipated external interruptions or trauma, this may compound to greater
tedium to recalibrate the device.
While reliable, “GPS satellites broadcast their signals in space with a certain
accuracy, but what you receive depends on additional factors, including satellite
geometry, signal blockage, atmospheric conditions, and receiver design
features/quality.”71 The MicroZed TGS can be affected by the inconsistencies of the GPS system. If the signal does become skewed for any reason, the ping itself will be delayed. This can interfere with a proper time and location reading down the line. This would be another area of research to help mitigate this risk, especially when an error like that could cause another large-scale power outage.
Professor Covault mentioned that he and his development team still are in testing over the device’s long-range data synchronization capabilities in various
scenarios. They are testing the limits of the device through one chip to relay signals
to each other wirelessly over a long distance. Prof. Covault expressed interested
and mentioned that it was feasible to attach the MicroZed TGS to the boxes on
power lines. If the technology needs to monitor boxes and relay it back to a central
hub, the device needs to have a reliable synchronization signal that can last for
miles.
71 U.S. Government GPS Website, GPS Accuracy, web article, https://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/performance/accuracy/ Date Last Updated: December 17, 2017 Date last accessed: May 2, 2019
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Adapting this technology into a microlocation system of devices will take
significant investment as the MicroZed TGS is just only one component. Asset tracking is near instantaneous and can be used for soldier monitoring in defense, or simply tracking packages carefully around a factory. To remain competitive devices such as these would require that the radius accuracy would require 30 cm or less of detection radius, which is approximately 3 ns of resolution, which the device can achieve at the current specifications. Unfortunately, the device relies on
GPS signals to operate and deduce between which second ping sets off the internal counter, it will require an antenna implement or would have to tap into the phone’s already unreliable GPS receiver. The MicroZed TGS may struggle in GPS challenged environments, so additional steps will be needed to ensure that the device can receive a ping from a GPS satellite.
For the firefighter and emergency personnel tracking application,
specifically, the wearable device, i.e. beacon, will need to function hidden beneath the clothing or in an insulated, heat-resistant container attached to the suit. Beacons will also have to be attached to the breathing apparatuses to measure the active personnel’s oxygen level and intake in-addition to their timestamped, geo-located ping. The MicroZed TGS would then have to be fit into a rugged box attached to
receivers outside. Implementation of the receivers would be ideally
straightforward, having the ability to read over long distances of up to 15 km in
radius. The MicroZed TGS devices can be housed in rugged, insulated containers installed on street powerlines.
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Finally, development in external, monitoring software will be needed to be
developed in conjunction with whichever application the developers of the
MicroZed TGS chooses. For personnel tracking, a central computer accessing this network at every fire station on a secured frequency would ensure that this device remains only accessible to fire personnel and their operators at the station monitoring them. More testing is needed on creating a suitable beacon, creating a strong enough UWB pulse to penetrate the GPS-starved environment of a burning
building, and develop software to deduce the relative locations with an accurate
geotag corresponding to the exact location of the beacon’s ping. For Traveling wave
detection software must be developed to accurate monitor the current and
impedance of each bus on the power grid and have it deduce and react to a system.
The software demands for each indented application would need to be thoroughly
vetted and maintained.
V.3: Potential Funding Sources
Funding opportunities within the NIST do exist. If the developers of the
TGS decide to pursue the application in fire safety, the NIST has a Division of
Public Safety Research Communications Division. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon
University applied for a grant, listed in Appendix A, to research a device not too
unlike the TGS to detect active duty firefighter personnel from the outside with a
grant for $1 million.72
72 NSF Grant Application, PFI:BIC - A Cost-effective Accurate and Resilient Indoor Positioning System, Award Number: 1534114. (2015-17) See Appendix A for the full Application.
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For defense applications the following departments offer grants in timing
technologies: “the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) leads a timing for
critical infrastructure program, while the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI)
leads a timing and security program specifically for the power industry. Both
programs are specifically targeting the industry’s reliance on GNSS and seeking
various options to make power systems more resilient against or in light of time
errors.”73 An opportunity was posted by the National Institute of Standards for
Measurement Science and Engineering in 2016: grant NIST-MSE-0174 for timing
technologies. Other governmental organizations that offer SBIR and STTR grants
are The National Science Foundation, National Institute of Standards and
Technology, and the Department of Energy.
Apple bought a startup for indoor iPhone detection technology in 2013,
WiFiSlam, for $20 million;75 it was a pioneering startup who aimed at approaching the then-out of reach goal of 2.5m indoor GPS accuracy. It acquired another start- up, indoor.io, in 2016,76 and another company Flyby Media,77 that presented to
Apple tangible opportunities to merge AR, self-driving car technology and indoor
mapping. If the success of the MicroZed technology is significant enough, there is
73 NIST, Timing Challenges in the Smart Grid, NIST Special Publication 1500-08, December 2017 74 NIST, Grant information document, AMENDED NOTICE OF FUNDING OPPORTUNITY FOR THE MEASUREMENT SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING (MSE) RESEARCH GRANT PROGRA, June 2018 75 Lessin E., Jessica, The Wall Street Journal, news article, Apple Acquires Indoor Location Company WifiSLAM, Published: Mar 23, 2013 76 Shead, Sam, Business Insider, news article, Apple secretly acquired a Finnish company to help it map indoor spaces, Published Dec 1, 2016 77 Heath, Alex, Business Insider, news article, Apple just bought a company working on some impressive augmented reality tech, published Jan 29, 2016
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a danger of being acquired, however, being such a new product, larger companies
may hesitate before acquiring.
V.4 Potential Competitors
Because the device was not patented as soon as it was developed, there will
be steep competition from other similar devices if the MicroZed TGS were to enter
commercial usage. If the developers of the TGS wish to go in the direction of
adapting it for microlocation technology, Humatics LLC, Zebra Technologies LLC,
and Omnitek Inc. have both patented and released microlocation scanners designed
to track changes in the whereabouts of its beacons via pings to sensors at fixed
points.
Humatics LLC filed for a patent, HIGH PRECISION TIME OF FLIGHT
MEASUREMENT SYSTEM FOR INDUSTRIAL AUTOMATION (US
2016/0363663 A1, Dec 15, 2016), for a technology similar in application to how
the MicroZed could be used within a microlocation technology. While primarily
oriented for tracking objects in an automated, industrial context, it is “a system for
tracking position of objects includes at least one interrogator which transmits a first
electromagnetic signal and provides a first reference signal corresponding to the
transmitted signal.”78 The technology enumerated is designed with industrial applications in mind, from monitoring. Their public fact sheet claims that a “single
78 Humantics LLC., HIGH PRECISION TIME OF FLIGHT MEASUREMENT SYSTEM FOR INDUSTRIAL AUTOMATION, US 2016/0363663 A1, Dec 15, 2016
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KinetIQ 1000 system can pinpoint multiple sensors wirelessly with millimeter-
scale precision.”79 It continues to list the remainder of its features in Table 2.
Table 2 List of Features mentioned for the KinetIQ 1000 • localizing AGVs and mobile robots for repeatable loading/unloading down to the millimeter • calibrating precise relative positions of modular workcell components for Industry 4.0 realization • positioning tool endpoints for accurate real-time feedback and user control • facilitating modular factory layouts with accurate, flexible localization of machining resources • Localizing non-rigid attachments for ultra-precise independent end-effector feedback • reducing acquisition time of robot installation workcells relative to optical systems
Specifically, for microlocation devices, Carnegie Mellon University
researcher Anthony Rowe and Washington University’s researcher and department
head of engineering Bruno Sinopoli et. al.8081 collaborated on multiple devices that utilize Ultra-Wideband (UWB) technology for live tracking emergency responder beacon-sensor ping relay systems for both smartphone and computer software processing. The MicroZed technology would face stiff competition from the large body of research spanning three decades to implement novel technologies to aid and track responders. In appendix A, there is a NIST grant awarded to Anthony
Rowe and Bruno Sinopoli for the development of the actual device for $1 million.
79 Humatics LLC, An RF Alternative to Machine Vision, datasheet, Last updated: 9/6/2018 80Niranjini Rajagopal, Sindhura Chayapathy, Bruno Sinopoli, Anthony Rowe. “Beacon Placement for Range-Based Indoor Localization” 2016 International Conference on Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation (IPIN), 4-7 October 2016, Alcala de Henares, Spain 81 Patrick Lazik, Niranjini Rajagopal, Anthony Rowe, Bruno Sinopoli. "Ultrasonic Time Synchronization and Ranging on Smartphones". Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium, IEEE (ed.), 108-118, 13, April, 2015.
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There has been a recent emphasis on wearable technology as it is rugged, lightweight, and can easily monitor vitals of the responders in the inclement conditions of their work.
Zebra Technologies has developed and patented82 a Dart Ultra-Wideband
(UWB83) geolocation tagging system. It apparently has been in development for at least 25 years, explaining that it “is the world’s first UWB solution that is compliant with the new International UWB Standard, IEEE 802.15.4.f, as well as the ISO-24730-61 Draft International standard,84 making it cross-compatible with other non-compliant UWB tags.
The Dart UWB is a short-range device that has a maximum range of 200 meters and claims that it can be configured to have a ping accuracy of 150m to 1 foot. The end user are generic uses in asset tracking within factories and in industry.
The company claims that they can tailor their device to whatever need their end user desires, which raises questions about their marketing. Zebra Technologies
“offers AIDC products, including mobile computers, barcode scanners, radio frequency identification device readers, specialty printers for barcode labeling and personal identification, and real-time location systems; related accessories and supplies, such as self-adhesive labels and other consumables; and software utilities and applications.”85 Being such a diverse technological developer could turn the
82Zebra Technologies INTERFERENCE REUECTION IN ULTRA-WIDEBAND REAL TIME LOCATING SYSTEMS US 9,571,143 B2 Feb 14, 2017 83 Zebra UWB Technology, datasheet provided by company website, published 12/1/2018 84 Zebra UWB Technology, datasheet provided by company website, published 12/1/2018 85 Bloomberg, Company Overview of Zebra Technologies Corporation, website, https://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapId=393488. Last accessed: May 2, 2019
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product into a general purpose device, to be adapted for the end-user’s function,
rather than for a specific application.
Omnitek Technologies has received a Phase I grant from the NSF86 to
develop a SONAR microlocation tacking system for mobile devices. However, this
is a less flexible system since SONAR is less practical to use for live fire safety
personnel tracking. Omnitek’s device can be used for indoor security systems at an
airport, or a large public building for geofencing technology or tracking assets on a
battlefield.
In the application of pure timekeeping technologies, there are recently
developed ns-accurate atomic clocks. Microsemi has claimed to create the ‘world’s
first’ Chip-Scale Atomic Clock87 for an unlisted price on their website. I have
requested a quote, but they did not reply, implying that their device is expensive.
The site states in its opening line, “the device provides the accuracy and stability of
atomic clock technology while achieving significant breakthroughs in reduced size,
weight and power (SWaP) consumption.”88 This device could be a competitor, and currently appears to be an innovator in the microchip-scale atomic clock device.
MicroZed TGS is simply made from off-the shelf components. Other competitors
86 See Appendix A for their full grant application 87 Microsemi, public fact sheet, Chip Scale Atomic Clock (CSAC), https://www.microsemi.com/product-directory/clocks-frequency-references/3824-chip-scale- atomic-clock-csac Last accessed: May 2, 2019, 88 Microsemi, public fact sheet, Chip Scale Atomic Clock (CSAC), https://www.microsemi.com/product-directory/clocks-frequency-references/3824-chip-scale- atomic-clock-csac Last accessed: May 2, 2019,
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are in the research stage repurposing traditional clocks on the small scale.89 Their methods include supercooling cesium and rubidium, which are rare and expensive.
Another potential competitor could be a small startup from CERN, The
White Rabbit project, was started in 2008 by Javier Serrano,90 who began developing the White Rabbit Project in 2009. Their public Wiki overview explains, that “White Rabbit (WR) is an extension to Ethernet technology developed in collaboration with many institutes and companies. It allows users to synchronize remote pieces of equipment to within one billionth of a second (1 nanosecond).”91
It further elaborates, that “the project is completely based on free software and
Open Source Hardware.”92
From the description alone, the project seems to develop the same type of product as the MicroZed TGS. In fact the project’s website describes the proposed system as a combination of readily available parts that CERN would have access to involving, a “Precision Time Protocol (IEEE 1588), Synchronous Ethernet, Digital
Dual-Mixer” and has equipment designed for “Time Difference (DDMTD) phase detection,” 93 essentially a large matrix of timekeeping devices like electronic oscillators connected to each other via fiber optic cables. Ethernet depends on a fiber optic connection to transfer signals within and around itself. The idea in mind is to have their atomic clock synchronized to some sort of external standard
89 Daniel M. Farkas, Alex Zozulya, Dana Z. Anderson, A Compact Microchip-Based Atomic Clock Based on Ultracold Trapped Rb Atoms, APPLIED PHYSICS LETTERS 96, 093102 (2010) Published 21 Dec 2009 90White Rabbit Project Wiki, website, https://www.ohwr.org/projects/white-rabbit/wiki/status 91 White Rabbit Project Wiki, website, https://www.ohwr.org/projects/white-rabbit/wiki/status 92 White Rabbit Project Wiki, website, https://www.ohwr.org/projects/white-rabbit/wiki/status 93 White Rabbit Project Wiki, website, https://www.ohwr.org/projects/white- rabbit/wiki/synchronization
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established at the IEEE “defined under the form of a Profile of the Precision Time
Protocol.” 94 The developers of White Rabbit have created a special software that will read and manage the signals sent through the wired connection to the White
Rabbit device “known as ‘WR PTP Daemon.’” 95
The White Rabbit’s device appears at face value to be a clear competitor to
MicroZed TGS. Not only are they tackling the idea of network synchronization via
connecting at least a thousand smaller nodes, but they are also targeting any sort of
possible application for its use. It is a flexible system that will function perfectly
well for research, as the people at CERN who designed the product were already
working with standard atomic clocks. The accuracy of their system will surpass that
of the MicroZed TGS product and may be the go-to option for researchers requiring
time tagged, geo-located signals with an accuracy of at least a thousandth of a
nanosecond.
Once the White Rabbit Project is commercialized, this system will likely
stand to compete with the market for atomic clocks at large-scale facilities like
LIGO or CERN. The White Rabbit project, however, is still developing the technology, as stated on their overview site and as inferred from the following excerpt from their most recent published article about their conference talk to the
2017 Joint Conference of the European Frequency and Time Forum and the
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) “to perform experiments
94 White Rabbit Project Wiki, website, https://www.ohwr.org/projects/white- rabbit/wiki/synchronization 95 White Rabbit Project Wiki, website, https://www.ohwr.org/projects/white- rabbit/wiki/synchronization
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with White Rabbit for time and frequency dissemination over long distance optical
fiber links.96
The White Rabbit Project appears to have developed its technology and is
testing the accuracy of signals sent over long distances via the fiber optic network.
They are still testing the limits of its capabilities now, which signals that there is
real progress. After about ten years of research and development of this instrument,
the project is close to beginning to commercialize their network. The White Rabbit
may not ever be commercially viable because this product requires an entire to
facility to operate; it must be added to the fiber optic network; requires an external time standard to synchronize timed events; and it will likely add up to an exorbitant price for the top of the line technology requires an entire facility to house. The atomic clock that the White Rabbit developed may rival cesium or rubidium atomic clocks, but not every market needs such bulky infrastructure, e.g. power grids.
In addition, Texas Instruments has developed a THS788 Quad-Channel
Time Measurement Unit (TMU), released in March 2010. “The THS788 device is a four-channel timing measurement unit (TMU) that incorporates a time-to- digital converter (TDC) architecture for fast and The TMU can provide 8 ps of accuracy.
The TDC has a 13-ps resolution (LSB), which is derived from an external master
clock of 200 MHz. The TDC uses fast LVDS- serial result outputs, which allows
96 Namneet Kaur; Florian Frank; Paul-Eric Pottie; Philip Tuckey, Time and frequency transfer over a 500 km cascaded White Rabbit network, 2017 Joint Conference of the European Frequency and Time Forum and IEEE International Frequency Control Symposium (EFTF/IFCS), 9-13 July 2017 ISSN: 2327-1949
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for fast and reliable [communication between the clock and output]. Each channel
can process timestamps 50 MHz at a maximum speed of 200 MSPS.”97
With competitors in the picosecond accuracy range, the TI device seems to use the architecture that MicroZed TGS uses and appears to be affordable and useable in research in many overlapping fields such as in medicine, radar, and atomic research. The TI device is much more powerful than the MicroZed TGS, and readily adaptable to a variety of needs. The chief separation between this device and the MicroZed TGS appears to be its lack of GPS connectivity and the lack of an internal clock standard, even if the primary mechanism for timekeeping within this device appears to be from a mechanical oscillator and deduces time-tagged events in a similar manner to the MicroZed TGS. Table 2 lists all of the device specifications mentioned in the Manufacturers guide.
Table 3 Device Specifications for the THS788 Quad-Channel Time Measurement Unit (TMU) • Four Event Channels + Sync Channel • Single-Shot Accuracy: 8 ps, One Sigma • Precision: 13 ps accurate measurements. • Result Interface Range: 0 s to 7 s of single-shot accuracy. • Event Input Rate: 200 MHz • Programmable Serial-Result Interface Speed: compatible interfaces for all of its event inputs and 75 MHz to 300 MHz • High-Speed Serial Host-Processor Bus Interface: data transfer. • High-Speed LVDS-Compatible Serial-Result Bus • Programmable Serial-Result Bus Length • Temperature Sensor mode (DDR and normal). • Single 3.3-V Supply • Power: 675 mW per Channel, 18 Bits, 300 MHz, • Automatic Test Equipment
97 Texas Instruments, THS788 Quad-Channel Time Measurement Unit (TMU) Datasheet, THS788 SLOS616D –MARCH 2010–REVISED MARCH 2015
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Three years later in 2013, TI produced another timekeeping device, an
arguably stronger device of the same kind, the LMX2485Q-Q1 500 MHz - 3.1 GHz
High Performance Delta-Sigma Low Power Dual PLLatinum™ Frequency
Synthesizers With 800-MHz Integer PL. This device is in the same price range of
the MicroZed TGS at $268.5698, which is approximately $100 more than a
MicroZed motherboard. This device while touting a 50% MHz increase of their timing device via completely different system from an entirely separate architecture from three years before. “Unlike analog compensation, the digital feedback technique used in the LMX2485Q-Q1 is highly resistant to changes in temperature and variations in wafer processing. The LMX2485Q-Q1 delta-sigma modulator is programmable up to fourth order, which allows the designer to select the optimum modulator order to fit the phase noise, spur, and lock time requirements of the system”99
These major systemic architecture changes reveal that the focus on
improving the original 300MHz device was to aid its ruggedness, ns timing
accuracy, despite a complete change in system architecture, i.e. a marginal change
as these changed maintained the 300MHz device’s base flexibility and function.
While the digital timekeeping system was updated to be more readily programmed
and to be read by computers more accurately, there was no mention of geolocation
compatibility as its list of potential uses remain largely the same: in high industry
98 Website, https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/texas-instruments/LMX2487E-EVM/296- 45794-ND/5005345 Date Last Accessed: 5/6/2019 99 Texas Instruments, LMX2485Q-Q1 500 MHz - 3.1 GHz High Performance Delta-Sigma Low Power Dual PLLatinum™ Frequency Synthesizers With 800-MHz Integer PLL Datasheet, SNOSCP7A –MARCH 2013–REVISED JANUARY 2016
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and academia. With the remainder of the competition using 300 MHz oscillators as time keeping mechanisms, it appears that the MicroZed TGS’s 200 MHz oscillator is simply outclassed; what MicroZed TGS then offers greater versatility over the inferior accuracy.
V.5 Patentability
The MicroZed TGS device itself should be patentable due to my prior art search returning no equivalent product before 2018. The Chinese patents listed in
Appendix C appear to be TGS-like in that they have the same GNSS compatibility; however, a more rigorous translation would be needed to help determine the freedom to operate.
Had the device not been expressly mentioned in the Pierre Auger Report of
1997 then there could be a solid claim of nonequivalence. In 1997 there was certainly an opportunity to patent this device as it would have been a breakthrough technology 21 years ahead of its time. All patents and grants mentioned in this paper were filed at least in this century. Having this device patented in 1997 could have helped make the MicroZed TGS a successful product, perhaps not in 1997 when
GPS was still new and in its commercial infancy, but in the coming decade in any of its potential applications. That being said, had the patent been filed, and approved, in 1997, with final approval being around 2001, the patent could be expired or closely approaching its expiration today. It would be pure speculation to suggest they would have anticipated the development of IoT, drones, personal electric generation, and smartphone based microlocation systems that early.
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V.6 Disruptive Product
Harvard Professor of Economics Clayton Christenson investigated in his seminal work, The Innovator’s Dilemma, the theory of why large, well established corporations fail due to pressures from a new product that is generally inferior in quality and completely opens a new market. Christensen makes the distinction in his work between sustaining and disruptive technologies: with sustaining technology as “most new technologies [that] foster improved product performance…some sustaining technologies can be discontinuous or radical in
character, while others are of an incremental nature. What all sustaining
technologies have in common is that they improve the performance of established
products that mainstream customers in major markets have historically valued.”100
While Christensen defines technologies as disruptive if they “result in worse
product performance, at least in the near term.”101 He continues to explain that disruptive technologies “bring to a market a very different value proposition that had been previously. Generally disruptive technologies underperform established products in mainstream markets. But they have other features that a few fringe (and generally new) customers value. Products based on disruptive technologies are typically cheaper, simpler, smaller, and, frequently much more convenient to use.”
102
TGS would be a classic example of a disruptive product. Essentially the
White Rabbit project is at the highest end of innovation, reserved only for the
100 Christensen, Clayton, The Innovator’s Dilemma, Introduction (1996) 101 Christensen, Clayton, The Innovator’s Dilemma, Introduction (1996) 102 Christensen, Clayton, The Innovator’s Dilemma, Introduction (1996)
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smallest, yet highest paying market available: official organizations of timekeeping
standards, multinational research organizations that require nano- and picosecond
accuracy on time readings. The market for utilities companies, power grids, IoT,
fire safety personnel tracking does not require such fine accuracy that the multifacility atomic clocks provide, instead they require cost-effect, portable devices that can synchronize a lot of information and geolocate it fast. While Smart
Grids are looking to expand the fiber optic network, the fiber optic network currently exists separately from the normal power grid, and a market for this device will only emerge once the power grids of the developed world undergo a complete transformation. Until then, the level of accuracy required by the current power grid would be easily handled by Micro Zed TGS; it is small, fits on a chip and is affordable while allowing it to accomplish its need.
This is significant because the point of the book is that Christensen argued that as established firms, like White Rabbit, or traditional atomic clocks only become incrementally better, despite millions, if not billions, invested in research.
The TGS could be developed and could eventually meet or surpass the original capabilities of the traditional atomic clocks while accessing a new market that has
been searching for suitable atomic timekeeping technology for perhaps a decade.
While it may sound extreme at this point to say that it will completely disrupt the
atomic clock industry is speculation, however, when Christensen cited a chapter
devoted to the computer disk industry and how each minor improvement in cheaper,
smaller devices were introduced, they can become as strong as their competitors.
This lead to a constant cycle of computer processors becoming smaller and more
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efficient, disrupting the previous market in matters of years. While that is certainly an extreme case of a computing revolution, this technology has the potential to later rival the traditional atomic clock both in its affordability and ease of use.
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VI.0. Conclusion
Whether or not there is a current market for the MicroZed TGS in the
immediate present, there will almost certainly be one in the coming decades.
Nanosecond accuracy is largely in the realm of scientific research and millisecond
accuracy is commonly used in industry. The discrepancy between accuracy
resolutions means than any product rooted in research to be accessible to the lower
markets challenging. The device requires a GPS signal to operate, which will put physical limitations on its implementation, as well as its potential applications in areas where ‘labs in the basement’ will have difficulty using it. The MicroZed TGS has potential markets in which it has a chance at success; however, significant time and effort will be needed to package the product for each such market.
Luckily for the developers of the MicroZed TGS, the NIST appears to be a place to begin applying for research grants. The MicroZed TGS seems to be almost perfectly designed for the needed applications in the development of a Smart Grid for the United States. There is a grant to conduct research on this device and its actual application and engineering into the new grid. IoT and Smart Grid applications are rife with opportunity, as their markets are currently exploding. The market in personnel tracking or armed soldier tracking also seem like viable outputs for the MicroZed TGS. Only time will tell and which application the developers choose. Regardless of their choice, there will be market players looking to compete and potentially buy out this product. The MicroZed TGS has the potential to be a disruptive product, but also equally likely to be bought out quickly by a large technology company. That is a risk for any technology, but the developers should
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consider action as the target markets specified in this paper may not even exist in a few years.
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Appendix A: List of Relevant Grant Applications to the MicroZed TGS
Low Probability Intercept/Detect (LPI/LPD) Alternative Navigation System Demonstration
Award Information
Agency:Department of HUBZone Owned:N Defense Branch: Navy Woman Owned:N Contract:N68936-17-C- Socially and 0067 Economically Disadvantaged:N Agency Tracking DUNS:054672662 Number:N161-002-0745 Amount:$749,999.00 Phase:Phase II Program:SBIR Awards Year:2017 Solicitation Year:2016 Solicitation Topic Code:N161-002 Solicitation Number:2016.1 Small Business Information TOYON RESEARCH CORPORATION 6800 Cortona Drive, Goleta, CA, 93117 Principal Investigator Name: Kenan Ezal Phone: (805) 968-6787 Email: [email protected] Business Contact Name: Marcella Lindbery Phone: (805) 968-6787 Email: [email protected] Research Institution N/A Abstract
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The Long Range Navigation (LORAN) system was a proven and stable navigation aid until it was abandoned because of the success of the Global Positioning System (GPS). However, while being highly successful, GPS has created a single point of failure for many military and civilian applications requiring precise time and position. Therefore, it is now clear that a backup to GPS is required and the enhanced-LORAN (eLORAN) system is being proposed to take over that role. The performance of an eLORAN-aided navigation system under GPS-denied and all- weather conditions was studied during the Phase I effort. The simulated performance of the design indicates that the proposed adaptive eLoran-aided positioning and timing (ADEPT) system will be capable of achieving global GPS- like positioning accuracy under GPS-denied conditions using signals from either GPS pseudolites, eLoran, ADEPT beacons, or alternative signals-of-opportunity (SoOp). In beacon-aided mode, the ADEPT receiver requires only two beacons, rather than the four GPS pseudolite/satellite signals required, and achieves centimeter-level performance for a full 3 D position and time solution, and meets the Joint Precision Approach and Landing System (JPALS) requirements under GPS-denied conditions. In SoOp-aided mode, the system achieves better than 10 m circular error probable (CEP) performance under all-weather conditions.
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Handheld Dismount Kit for Persistent, Precision Navigation in GPS-challenged Environments for Military Operations Award Information Agency:Department of HUBZone Owned:N Defense Branch: Air Force Woman Owned:N Contract:FA8650-18-C- Socially and 1660 Economically Disadvantaged:N Agency Tracking DUNS:801184982 Number:F2-8653a Amount:$799,969.00 Phase:Phase II Program:SBIR Awards Year:2018 Solicitation Year:2015 Solicitation Topic Code:AF153-002 Solicitation Number:2015.3 Small Business Information Echo Ridge, LLC 100 Carpenter Drive, Sterling, VA, 20164 Principal Investigator Name: John Carlson Phone: (703) 437-0404 Email: [email protected] Business Contact Name: Joe Kennedy Phone: (571) 748-4892 Email: [email protected] Research Institution N/A Abstract Echo Ridge proposes to deliver quantity three first-generation augmented positioning system (APS) devices to AFRL at the end of the 12-month sequential Phase II effort.The units will be capable of producing accurate PNT estimates in GPS-denied environments in a stand-alone operational mode.The units will include
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improvements to both the PNT estimation methods and the hardware platform developed and prototyped as part of the prior Phase II contract.The effort will also include laboratory testing, field testing, and demonstrations.PNT estimates will be passed to directly-connected or remote Android-based user equipment (UE) that will be displayed on the ATAK mapping application, along with a position uncertainty error ellipse.APS employs an SDR architecture which allows it to use a broad variety of terrestrial and space based SoOP sources in a low weight/power package.The lightweight APS module is easily worn by dismounted military forces; can operate on batteries for extended periods of time; can operate in daylight or darkness, in inclement weather, and in environments with little or no infrastructure, such as remote deserts and forests.
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SBIR Phase I: A Robust Indoor Localization System for Mobile Devices
Award Information Agency: National HUBZone Owned:N Science Foundation Branch: N/A Woman Owned:N Contract:1722173 Socially and Economically Disadvantaged:N Agency Tracking DUNS:080472154 Number:1722173 Amount:$225,000.00 Phase:Phase I Program:SBIR Awards Year:2017 Solicitation Year:2016 Solicitation Topic Code:I Solicitation Number:N/A Small Business Information YODEL LABS INC 6401 Wilkins Ave, Pittsburgh, PA, 15217-1345 Principal Investigator Name: Patrick Lazik Phone: (781) 690-5475 Email: [email protected] Business Contact Name: Patrick Lazik Phone: (781) 690-5475 Email: [email protected] Research Institution N/A Abstract The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to provide accurate indoor location services to users via existing mobile electronic devices like smartphones, tablets and laptops.
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This technology will bring many of the applications powered by satellite-based positioning systems like navigation, tracking and location-based advertising to indoor markets. We propose using a hybrid ultrasound and RF-based beaconing system to enable sub-meter location accuracy within large GPS-denied environments. Our approach is unique in that it is compatible with current smartphones by simply downloading an app. The system uses an infrastructure comprised of beacons, which can be powered through indoor solar energy- harvesting instead of requiring expensive AC wiring. Accurate indoor location- aware mobile applications can enhance applications ranging from retail and manufacturing all the way to building navigation, asset tracking and aiding the visually impaired. The proposed project aims to develop a robust localization platform which can localize off-the-shelf devices like smartphones and tablets as well as low-cost RF tags to better than 1 meter of accuracy in indoor locations that do not have access to GPS. Current indoor localization technologies for smartphones often fall short in terms of accuracy, especially in highly dynamic environments with obstructions. Our system utilizes energy harvesting beacons with an array of speakers to transmit time-of-flight ranging signals in the near- ultrasound spectrum. These signals can be recorded and demodulated in software by commodity smartphones, while being inaudible to humans. The research in this phase will aim to develop the methods and technologies required to scale this localization technology so that it can support large facilities like airports and convention centers that would require tens to hundreds of beacons. This involves the development of scalable multiple access protocols for ultrasound communication, networking protocols for synchronization and data collection, inertial sensor fusion algorithms for robust and accurate localization and APIs for app integration by third parties.
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Alternative or Redundant Global Positioning System Navigation Award Information
Agency:Department of HUBZone Defense Owned:N
Branch:Special Operations Woman Owned:N Command
Contract:D16PC00228 Socially and Economically Disadvantaged:N Agency Tracking DUNS:054672662 Number:S161-001-0084
Amount:$150,000.00 Phase:Phase I Program:SBIR Awards Year:2016 Solicitation Year:2016 Solicitation Topic Code:SOCOM16-001
Solicitation Number:2016.1 Small Business Information TOYON RESEARCH CORPORATION 6800 Cortona Drive, Goleta, CA, 93117 Principal Investigator Name: Kenan Ezal, Ph.D. Phone: (805) 968-6787 Email: [email protected] Business Contact Name: Ms. Marcella Lindbery Phone: (805) 968-6787 Email: [email protected]
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Research Institution N/A Abstract The Global Positioning System (GPS) and other Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) have created a single point of failure for many military applications requiring precise time and position. The Long Range Navigation (LORAN) system was a proven navigation aid until it was abandoned because of the success of GPS. Now it is clear that a backup to GPS is required and the enhanced-LORAN (eLORAN) system is being proposed for that role. However, eLORAN cannot achieve the precision that GPS provides. Alternative navigation sensors include vision-based and celestial, yet neither can provide an all-weather solution like GPS. While there have been improvements in the performance of inertial measurement units (IMUs) based on micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) technology, they still do not achieve the type of stability required of navigation-grade instruments necessary for aviation. Other RF-based solutions include signals-of-opportunity (SoOp) and pseudolites, as well as collaborative navigation using existing communication networks. During this Phase I program Toyon will investigate the state-of-the-art in navigation technology and identify the most promising approach to meet the needs of missions conducted by Special Operations Forces (SOF). At the conclusion of this effort, a prototype system design will be completed in preparation for a Phase II demonstration.
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Redundant Gimbal-less Navigation and Positioning System
Award Information Agency:Department of HUBZone Owned:N Defense Branch:Special Woman Owned:Y Operations Command Contract:H92222-17- Socially and C-0071 Economically Disadvantaged:N Agency Tracking DUNS:153865951 Number:S2-0351 Amount:$995,736.00 Phase:Phase II Program:SBIR Awards Year:2017 Solicitation Year:2016 Solicitation Topic Code:SOCOM16-001 Solicitation Number:2016.1 Small Business Information PHYSICAL OPTICS CORPORATION 1845 West 205th Street, Torrance, CA, 90501 Principal Investigator Name: Volodymyr Romanov, Ph.D. Phone: (310) 320-3088 Email: [email protected] Business Contact Name: Gordon Drew Phone: (310) 320-3088 Email: [email protected] Research Institution N/A Abstract To address the USSOCOM need for an innovative alternate means or a redundant aircraft positioning and navigation system to operate in GPS-denied areas, Physical Optics Corporation (POC) proposed, and in Phase I successfully developed and
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demonstrated the feasibility of, a new Redundant Gimbal-less Navigation and Positioning (REGINA) system, including the Star Navigation System (SNS), Terrestrial Navigation System (TNS), and Self-Mixing Interferometry Navigation System (SMINS), together providing precise all-weather, all-altitude, day/night navigation and positioning of aircraft with GPS-like accuracy in GPS-denied areas. The developed system is based on a novel design that utilizes a blend of POC- developed and commercial off-the-shelf components. As a result, REGINA offers position estimates similar to those of existing precision navigation systems, while being compact, lightweight, and inexpensive. In Phase I, POC demonstrated the feasibility of REGINA through extensive computer modeling and simulation, and combinations of laboratory and field tests of critical components. In Phase II, POC plans to continue development of the system, build a system-level prototype, perform extensive testing, and demonstrate precise navigation similar to that of the DoDs GPS according to their requirements, specifications, and application scenarios.
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Innovative Non-GPS Geolocation Technologies for Hand and Remotely Emplaced Munitions
Award Information Agency:Department of HUBZone Owned:N Defense Branch:Army Woman Owned:N Contract:W15QKN-17- Socially and C-0004 Economically Disadvantaged:N
Agency Tracking DUNS:010230287 Number:A2-6341 Amount:$999,986.75 Phase:Phase II Program:SBIR Awards Year:2017 Solicitation Year:2015 Solicitation Topic Code:A15-068 Solicitation Number:2015.1
OMNITEK PARTNERS LLC 85 Air Park Drive-Unit 3, Ronkonkoma, NY, 81637 Principal Investigator Name: Philip Kwok Title: Project Manager Phone: (631) 665-4008 Email: [email protected] Business Contact Name: Jahangir Rastegar Phone: (631) 645-3279 Email: [email protected] Research Institution N/A A revolutionary non-GPS solution for geolocation for hand and remotely emplaced munitions is proposed. Novel, paradigm shifting technologies of RF polarized
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scanning and cavity sensor based direction of arrival are merged to enable discovery of emplaced munitions within a minimum zone of 10 kilometers. The spatial precision is better than 100 cm. The proposed solution naturally consumes low power. Embedding antennas into the munition ensures that the electronics occupy a volume which is less than 1 cubic inch. A single electronic scanner solution is sufficient to address the objectives of solicitation, minimizing the burden of transportation and deployment. The deployment has an extremely low probability of detection. An encrypted, low power, high speed, point-to-point, wireless link can be established with the host station for communication as needed. The scanner provides programmable capability to periodically monitor the unauthorized movement of the emplaced munition, and thus an accurate map of the emplaced munitions is always available to the host. The emplaced munitions may be in non-line-of-sight of the scanner, thereby allowing the scanner station to be hidden from the sight of the fielded embedded munitions. The proposed system meets the operational time and shelf life requirement of over 20 years.
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Calcium Slow Beam Optical Clock (CaSBOC) Award Information
Agency:Department of HUBZone Owned:N Defense Branch:Defense Woman Owned:N Advanced Research Projects Agency Contract:W31P4Q-17- Socially and C-0109 Economically Disadvantaged:N Agency Tracking DUNS:162344035 Number:F2-9617 Amount:$1,494,982.91
Phase:Phase II Program:SBIR
Awards Year:2017
Solicitation Year:2014
Solicitation Topic Code:AF141-110
Solicitation Number:2014.1 Business Information AOSense, Inc. 929 E Arques Ave, Sunnyvale, CA, 94085 Principal Investigator Name: Igor Teper Title: Principal Investigator Phone: (408) 735-9500 Email: [email protected] Business Contact Name: Jason Burke Phone: (408) 735-9500 Email: [email protected] Research Institution
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N/A Abstract AOSense proposes to design, build, and test a compact, calcium beam optical clock capable of providing GPS-quality time. The proposed clock will have a fully- integrated physics package containing the atomic reference, optical cavity, frequency comb, and all electro-optics and beam routing, which will tether to modular electronics.
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PFI:BIC - A Cost-effective Accurate and Resilient Indoor Positioning System
NSF Org: IIP Div Of Industrial Innovation & Partnersh
Initial Amendment August 26, 2015 Date:
Latest Amendment September 18, 2017 Date:
Award Number: 1534114
Award Instrument: Standard Grant
Program Manager: Jesus Soriano Molla IIP Div Of Industrial Innovation & Partnersh ENG Directorate For Engineering
Start Date: September 1, 2015
End Date: August 31, 2019 (Estimated)
Awarded Amount to $1,004,843.00 Date:
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Investigator(s): Bruno Sinopoli [email protected] (Principal Investigator) Burcu Akinci (Co-Principal Investigator) Anind Dey (Co-Principal Investigator) Anthony Rowe (Co-Principal Investigator)
Sponsor: Carnegie-Mellon University 5000 Forbes Avenue PITTSBURGH, PA 15213-3815 (412)268-8746
NSF Program(s): PARTNRSHIPS FOR INNOVATION-PFI, SPECIAL PROJECTS - CISE, IIS SPECIAL PROJECTS
Program Reference 1662 Code(s):
Program Element 1662, 1714, 7484 Code(s):
1. ABSTRACT
This Partnerships for Innovation: Building Innovation Capacity project aims at developing a cost effective, accurate, resilient and smart indoor localization service to be used in built environments. Positioning systems have revolutionized how we interact with the world around us. Outdoor mobile devices make use of technologies like Global Positioning System (GPS) to deliver a wide variety of location-based services. Similarly, indoor positioning systems will enable delivery of new services that provide tremendous social and commercial value to humans in residential and commercial built environments. Indoor location services can be used by enterprises to track and manage assets. Building management systems can use indoor location information to enable services for building managers and occupants and first responders, such as effective emergency response, indoor navigation, and perimeter protection. Furthermore, indoor location services will enable implementation of important services such as coordination of people in a disaster scenario (e.g., natural or man-made (public shootings) disasters and navigation services for the blind). Unfortunately, satellite-based approaches, such as GPS, do not work indoors due to weak satellite signals that do not penetrate through building facades. Unlike
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existing methods, the proposed smart service will achieve high accuracy and robustness with respect to disruptions, while maintaining low installation and maintenance costs. In addition, users will be able to use their mobile device(s), (e.g., smartphone, tablets, smart watches), without the need to carry/wear additional equipment.
The project will develop and combine ultrasound, visible light and Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN)-based positioning techniques with Radio Frequency (RF)- based, magnetic signatures, human ambulation models and building information models (BIMs) for localization, tracking and visualization. The combined use of several independent positioning techniquse not only will dramatically increase the accuracy of positioning over any single technique, but it will add the necessary redundancy to withstand disruption of all but one positioning service, with provably bounded loss of performance. Even in the case of unavailability of all positioning techniques, ambulation models, together with BIM, will be able to provide indoor positioning at a coarser level of granularity. In turn, redundancy can be used to perform maintenance and periodic system calibration on any subsystem without service interruption. The impressive feature of the proposed methodology is that all these properties can be achieved at low installation and maintenance costs, as the system can piggyback on a building's existing audio, lighting, and RF communication capabilities. One unique property of the proposed positioning algorithm will be its modularity and extensibility. Information coming from different sensors will be incorporated seamlessly, allowing the algorithm to work under intermittent failure of one of its subcomponents. The inclusion of ambulation models, together with accelerometer, gyroscope and compass data available on the majority of today's smartphones, will allow the achievement of fine-grain tracking, which will provide smooth trajectories in place of sequence of locations. In the proposed scheme, Multi-sensor localization and BIM play a synergetic role. BIM will contribute to decreasing installation and maintenance costs, by providing precise positioning of the sources of ranging (e.g., light, ultrasound, Wi-Fi antennas) and accurate topological information to develop high fidelity ranging models. Additionally, the semantic information provided by BIM will help with detecting infeasible trajectories. On the other hand, Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)-based techniques can help refine BIMs and keep them updated. Dynamic information can enhance BIMs by providing useful information to building managers about traffic patterns and occupancy. Importantly, the design of the smart service needs to be human-centered and to take into account each of the stakeholders, i.e., owner and facilities management team, the service developers, the users of the smart service application program interface (API), who will develop value-added services customized for a particular facility or more generally for many facilities, and, of course, the end-users, the occupants and visitors of the facility, who will use the smart services themselves. To understand the needs and wants of such distinct groups of stakeholders, the project will directly involve them by conducting a series of focus groups. Participatory design is an established technique where a design team works directly with stakeholders to design an artifact or service. Stakeholders will also be engaged in the formal testing of the software
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service, from installation to maintenance, to application design and to application usage.
At the inception of the project, partners include the lead institution: Carnegie Mellon University, (Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, and the Human-Computer Interaction Institute) Pittsburgh, PA, with primary partners: Bosch RTC Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, PA, large business) and Sports and Exhibition Authority (Pittsburgh, PA, large business).
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Appendix B: MicroZed Board Information
Figure 5 MicroZed board. Its compact design can be neatly packaged into a rugged device. As specified in the MicroZed User Guide, copied here for easy reference. The user guide mentions that the product is created under five definitions as follows:
Evaluation The evaluation kit version of MicroZed includes the Kit Zynq 7010 device as well as several other items to make out-of-box evaluation simpler. These extra items include a microUSB cable, Vivado Design Edition license voucher (device-locked to the 7010), 4 GB MicroSD card pre-loaded with a Linux test system, and a plastic carrying box. The majority of the tutorials published at www.microzed.org are targeted at this kit. The board included in the kit will work either as a standalone board or as a SOM plugged onto a carrier card. SOM System-on-module. These cards will work standalone or plugged into a carrier card. The SOM versions exclude a few items outlined in the Evaluation Kit definition above. The SOMs are intended to be sold in volume, for use with carrier cards. Industrial Same as SOM, except populated entirely with SOM components that comply with a tested temperature
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range of -40° to 85° C, with the exception of the MicroSD card connector (502570-0893) which is rated at -25° to 85° C. Avnet has tested the Industrial SOMs to this temperature range with a thorough functional test. However, Avnet does not guarantee that the industrial SOM will function to this full temperature range under all conditions. End users are still responsible for proper airflow and heat mitigation. Cost- This is identical to the SOM with the exception that Optimized all of the circuitry required for operating in SOM standalone mode has been removed. The cost- optimized SOMs will ONLY work when plugged into a carrier card. The reduction in components allows these boards to be offered at a lower cost in volume. For a full listing of differences, see the yellow-highlighted items in the cost-optimized bill of materials. Cost- Same as the Cost-Optimized SOM, except Optimized populated entirely with components that comply Industrial with a tested temperature range of -40° to 85° C, SOM with the exception of the MicroSD card connector (502570-0893) which is rated at -25° to 85° C. Avnet has tested the Industrial SOMs to this temperature range with a thorough functional test. However, Avnet does not guarantee that the industrial Cost-Optimized SOM will function to this full temperature range under all conditions. End users are still responsible for proper airflow and heat mitigation.
The features provided by the MicroZed User guide are as follows:
- Primary Components: o Xilinx Zynq 7010/7020 CLG400 AP SOC - Primary configuration = QSPI Flash - Auxiliary configuration options: o JTAG (through PL via Xilinx PC4 Header) o MicroSD Card - Memory: o 1 GB DDR3 (x32) o 128 Mb QSPI Flash o GB MicroSD Card (Evaluation Kit only, AES-Z7MB-7Z010- G)
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- Interfaces: o Xilinx PC4 Header for programming o Accesses Programmable Logic (PL) JTAG o Processing System (PS) JTAG pins connected through Digilent Pmod™ compatible interface o 10/100/1000 Ethernet o USB Host 2.0 o MicroSD Card o USB 2.0 Full-Speed USB-UART bridge o One Digilent Pmod compatible interface, connected to PS MIO o Two 100-pin MicroHeaders o Reset Button o 1 User Push Button o 1 User LEDs o DONE LED - On-board Oscillator: o 33.333 MHz - Power o High-efficiency regulators for Vccint, Vccpint, Vccbram, Vccaux, Vccpaux, Vccpll, Vcc_0, Vcco_ddr,Vcc_mio - Three potential powering methods: o USB Bus Power from USB-UART interface o Optional barrel jack and AC/DC supply o Optional carrier card - Software: o Vivado Design Suite: Download from www.xilinx.com/support/download.html o Vivado Design Suite: Design Edition license voucher (node- locked, device-locked to the XC7Z010 – Evaluation Kit only, AES-Z7MB-7Z101-G
NOTES: - Xilinx offers the WebPACK Vivado license which covers both the 7Z010 and 7Z020. - See https://www.xilinx.com/products/design-tools/vivado/vivado- webpack.html - WebPACK users may purchase EF-VIVADO-DEBUG-NL for $695 to add Vivado - Logic Analyzer and Vivado Serial I/O Analyzer.
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Appendix C: Relevant Patents Requiring Translation
Due to the lack of the ability to acquire a reliable translation beyond internet translation machines and Chinese students at Case Western have declined due to their complexity, the following patents and their abstracts found on Google
Patents have been listed here intended for future revision due to their relevancy to the project:
A kind of pseudolite systems and method based on GNSS accurate time transmission - CN201811179445.5A – Filed 2018
Abstract The invention belongs to survey and draw and navigation field, disclose a kind of pseudolite systems and method based on GNSS accurate time transmission, GNSS receiver and Pseudolite signal transmitter are driven using same source crystal oscillator, and using the clock deviation of the Static Precise Point Positioning model Real-time solution receiver local clock with coordinates restriction, then the method by demarcating hardware delay eliminates the hardware delay between signal projector and GNSS receiver；It solves obtained local clock clock deviation to be broadcast by way of text to user, realizes that local clock is synchronous with mathematics when GNSS system.The present invention can be achieved that single pseudolite systems are synchronous with GNSS system chronometer time, without constructing wired or wireless time synchronization link, save deployment cost and hardware complexity.Pseudolite systems of the present invention are more convenient for realizing that alignment by union resolves with GNSS signal, improve the availability and reliability of navigator fix.
Sensor node based on WiFi wireless and GPS timing synchronization - CN201811074938.2A Filed 9/14/2018 Abstract The invention discloses a sensor node based on WiFi wireless and GPS timing synchronization and belongs to the technical field of structural health monitoring, which solves the problems of high cost of traditional sensor nodes, unsynchronized data acquisition and how to reliably combine a wireless transmission mode
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with GPS synchronization. The sensor node mainly comprises a GPS module, a WiFi module, a power management module and a data acquisition module. The sensor node in the invention effectively reduces the complicated steps of node arrangement and realizes time synchronization in true sense under the GPS timing, so that the collected data is more accurate; the wireless transmission mode and the GPS synchronization technology are effectively and reliably combined, thereby improving the data collection efficiency and reducing the cost. According to the sensor node in the invention, the whole circuit is subjected to a complete modularization design; the circuit performance is very stable and reliable; the failure rate is low; the service life is long; the simplified circuit design greatly shortens the product production cycle; and the enterprise production efficiency is extremely high.
Based on WiFi wirelessly with the distributed signal synchronous of GPS time service - CN201821513374.3U, Filed 9/14/2018 Abstract The utility model discloses a kind of based on WiFi wirelessly with the distributed signal synchronous of GPS time service, belongs to structural health monitoring technology field. Solve the problems, such as that traditional available data acquisition system wiring cost height, low efficiency, data are asynchronous and can not be by wireless transmission method reliable connection synchronous with GPS.It mainly include multiple sensor nodes in same time synchronization acquisition data, the sensor node is by WiFi by synchronous data transmission to terminal in a manner of wireless-transmission network. The utility model realizes time synchronization truly under WiFi wireless transmission and GPS time service, synchronization accuracy can reach delicate grade even nanosecond, it is low in energy consumption, frequency acquisition is versatile, the complete modularized design of sensor device node circuit, circuit performance is highly stable reliable, life cycle of the product is greatly shortened, enterprises production efficiency is very high; It is of great significance in structural health monitoring technology field.
Indoor and outdoor positioning system and method based on UWB fusion GPS and inertial navigation - CN201811106043.2A, Filed as a Global patent in 2018 Abstract The invention discloses a kind of indoor and outdoor positioning systems and method based on UWB fusion GPS and inertial navigation, are made of label subsystem, base sub-system, data processing subsystem.It is a kind of indoor and outdoor positioning system and localization method based on UWB fusion GPS
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and inertial navigation strapdown, realizes that dynamic of the target user indoors in outdoor varying environment is accurately positioned and partial data acquisition using UWB technology and inertial navigation.It is mainly used in Internet of Things industry, tourism industry, business place, airport, fire-fighting, public security, military affairs, parking lot, hospital, robot, unmanned plane, tunnel mine etc.
The indoor and outdoor positioning system and method for UWB and smart phone interconnection - CN201811106453.7A – Filed as a Global Patent 2018 Abstract The invention discloses the indoor and outdoor positioning system and method for a kind of UWB and smart phone interconnection, the UWB positioning system includes base sub-system, label subsystem, data processing subsystem, upper computer software, cell phone client APP, smart phone composition.Smart phone GPS system is added to realize that dynamic of the target user indoors in outdoor varying environment is accurately positioned and partial data acquires using UWB technology and INS.It is mainly used in Internet of Things industry, tourism industry, business place, airport, fire-fighting, public security, military affairs, parking lot, hospital, robot, unmanned plane, tunnel mine etc..
Based on UWB positioning and the matched localization method of laser map and mobile terminal - CN201811169738.5A – Filed in 2018 Abstract The present invention provides a kind of based on UWB positioning and the matched localization method of laser map, it include: to obtain mobile terminal first location information under current state, first location information is the UWB label and the position coordinates for the base station the UWB determination that surrounding is arranged in by being located on mobile terminal；Default characteristic is obtained according to first location information, default characteristic is the first laser data that current location is characterized in default laser map that mobile terminal is chosen on a preset condition based；Target signature data are obtained, target signature data are the second laser data of the characterization current goal pose of the lidar measurement on mobile terminal； Target signature data are matched with default characteristic to obtain the accurate pose of mobile terminal.The present invention is positioned using laser ranging mode, is not influenced by ambient；By uwb lock onto target region, then a small range with laser feature match be accurately positioned, positioning accuracy, speed, stability with it is at low cost.
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