Project Leader Matt Higgins, Department of Natural Resources and Water, Queensland Government'

1
CRCSI Project 1.4- Delivering Precise
Positioning Services in Regional Areas
Project Leader Matt Higgins, Department of
Natural Resources and Water, Queensland
Government. Co-Project Leader Yanming Feng,
Faculty of Information Technology, Queensland
University of Technology. Research Team
Samsun Lim, University of NSW, Maolin Tang,
Linda Burnett, Queensland University of
Technology.
Project Participants Universities Queensland
University of Technology and University of New
South Wales.Industry CTF Projects, Ergon Energy
GPS-Ag, Industrea, Leica Geosystems, Position
One, Trimble Navigation, V-TOL Aerospace.Public
Sector Queensland Department of Natural
Resources and Water, New South Wales Department
of Lands, Victorian Department of Sustainability
and Environment, Landgate Western Australia and
Geoscience Australia.
Objectives
To develop Global Navigation Satellite Systems
(GNSS) precise positioning services in regional
areas to facilitate the adoption of such services
in agriculture, mining, utilities, construction,
tourism, transportation, defence and
environmental protection
PROJECT 1.4 UNDERLYING MOTIVATION Around the
world there are now many networks of GNSS
Reference Stations delivering real time
centimetre accuracy positioning to users. Most of
those networks are in areas of high population
density with excellent Internet and mobile
communications infrastructure, i.e. areas with
so-called thick infrastructure. This project
will address the issues associated with
delivering such GNSS Reference Station networks
in rural and remote areas of Australia, which are
characterised by sparse populations and thin
infrastructure. The project is divided into two
parts the first part (Project 1.4.1) addresses
business issues and the second part (Project
1.4.2) addresses the technical issues.
Project 1.4.1 will be managed by Matt Higgins
from the Queensland Department of Natural
Resources and Water and will research and define
the business enablers to service adoption
(commercial, operational and institutional) when
extending a service like SunPOZ into regional
areas. Such business enablers include user
needs, market size and pricing sensitivities
common operating standards legal structure of
the service provider and possible partnership
models transfer pricing within the supply chain
and liability and intellectual property rights.
Based on this research it is intended that
Project 1.4.1 will develop a prototype for
partnering among the CRC and project participants
that can more effectively deliver SunPOZ services
to regional areas. It is possible that such a
partnership may also be attractive for
application in other states of Australia. It is
also possible that such a partnership model will
be useful for delivery of value added services
from the national AuScope GNSS Reference station
network, which will be developed over coming
years.

• Project 1.4.2 will be managed by Yanming Feng
  from the Queensland University of Technology. It
  will research a number of technical enablers to
  deploying a service like SunPOZ in sparsely
  populated regional areas where the available
  technology can be characterised as thin
  infrastructure.
• The first enabler is the technical framework for
  the current and future GNSS network architecture
  and operations. This will examine alternative
  approaches for precise positioning network
  architecture beyond the solutions currently
  offered by the major commercial suppliers. It
  will also address challenges and benefits of next
  generation GNSS such as GPS-III and Galileo in
  term of all level GNSS services at local,
  regional and global scales. The Figure above
  illustrates a possible architecture for networked
  CORS and computer servers designed to deliver
  precise positioning information to users who
  provide RTCM data streams to the system in real
  or near real time.
• The second is the communication enabler looking
  at appropriate communications infrastructure for
  both the providers reference stations and the
  clients rover receivers, when working in remote
  and sparsely populated regional areas.
• The third enabler is a software-based research
  platform to investigate and develop the next
  generation of precise positioning services.

Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial
Information www.crcsi.com.au