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A preliminary NTSB report involving the fatal Tesla crash in March has just be released. The report describes the accident:  A Tesla Model X operating in Autopilot mode was originally following a car in front of it. Seven seconds before the crash, the system began steering left and accelerated into a highway barrier. The driver’s […]

The Uber self-driving vehicle involved in fatal accident earlier this year wasn’t set to stop in an emergency, states a preliminary NTSB report. The Uber vehicle, a Volvo sport-utility car, is equipped with automatic emergency braking, however the system was disabled by Uber to “reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior.” According to the NTSB,

Since its inception, global reliance on GPS has increased tremendously. The Department of Defense has recognized this dependence as a single point-of-failure and is seeking to augment GPS with other systems to mitigate the effect of GPS jamming and spoofing. The goal is not to replace GPS, only to augment it with other redundant systems.

 The Russian military has been jamming US military drones in Syria for the past several weeks following a series of suspected chemical weapons attacks on civilians in eastern Ghouta. The Russian military was concerned about retaliation and began jamming the GPS systems of drones, impacting US operations. “Jamming, which means blocking or scrambling a drone’s

Since GPS’ inception in the 1970s, global reliance on the timing and positioning system has steadily increased. Today, GPS is used to do everything navigation to time-stamping financial transactions to dropping bombs. While GPS has certainly changed modern society for the better, researchers have become concerned with the global dependency on the service. What happens if it’s

A self-driving Uber vehicle ran into and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, AZ on Sunday, March 18th. The video collected by the Tempe police show the moments leading up to the collision. The vehicle was traveling around 40 mph at around 10 pm at night when the vehicle struck a woman walking her bike across the

Next generation GPS chips will permit global localization to within 30 cm, a big step forward for self-driving vehicles among other applications. Broadcom has announced that their next generation GPS chips will use less battery, work in urban canyons, and will have an accuracy of 30 cm. Current GPS units have an accuracy of 3-5

GPS underpins many modern systems, from time stamping financial transactions to map creation and navigation, but the system is vulnerable. In Summer 2017, dozens of ships in the Black Sea suddenly reported that their GPS units were malfunctioning and displaying the ships as inland. Experts indicate that this was a GPS spoofing attack performed by

GPS isn’t perfect; it it often off on the order of 1-10 meters, but it is almost never off by 25 miles. According to Gurvan Le Meur, the captain of a tanker traveling on the Black Sea in June this year, his GPS reported that the ship was located 25-30 miles from where it actually way.

Throughout several days in the end of June, over 20 ships reported problems with GPS reception in the Black Sea. According to experts, the problems were probably a result of an attack on the GPS infrastructure. Logs from ships affected by the GPS spoofing have been recovered and the evidence appears conclusive that it was