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by jasonpeacock·3y ago·view on hn ↗
They aren't driving a truck, the truck is driving itself and is guided by a high-resolution GPS-like service.

Providing a high-resolution GPS-like service at affordable scale is not simple.

2 comments
One can imagine planting a few posts at the corners of a field with a few dollars worth of radio equipment each, and getting higher resolution without relying on satellite.

Reading other comments here, it seems that these exist, in tandem with GPS, to get absolute positioning. But I don't see why absolute positioning would be needed; relative positioning should suffice.

It worth a lot more than “a few dollars”

Most technology give you 20+ cm resolution[1], the one farmer are using are at ~4cm resolution .

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11277-021-08209-5

I was thinking of component cost when I said a few dollars; of course a commercial product is going to sell for thousands. In the 60GHz band (IEEE 802.11ad), you can plausibly get down to ~.5cm resolution with cheap, COTS network gear.
The labor to make that work is going to be expensive, but yes you can do that. GPS with corrections is the cheap and easy way to ensure everything works and then you get back to the business of farming.
I think a more charitable read of OP is that you don’t need a satellite (or even GPS) to provide centimeter-accurate localization over a wide area. Spacebound systems are always going to have worse uptime and less resiliency than ground ones.