APPLICATION OF GRAPH
THEORY IN NAVIGATION
By Surya Kotamraja
GPS
GPS is a collection of interconnected satellites
1.
NAVIGATION IN PAST
In the early days the first man (Cave man) used to mark the direction in which they went.
They used stones, branches or rembered geogrophical refrences to mark the direction when
they used to catch prey. But that method was not efficent. The ancient greeks used a diffrent
type of navigatio they used to guess the postion by using stars as the stars looked diffrent and
diffrent postions. This method was especialy helpful for the sailers to locate the postion. But
there was one problom the stars were only visible in night and they were availble depending
on the weather conditions. They used to follow the ursa major constilation. This system was
there for many centuries then came the invention of magnetic compass. In a compass the
magnetic neddle always pointed to the north.
The sailors such as Cristphor Colunbous, Vasco Dagama used the knowlage of oceon
currents, wind pressure to determine the postion. In the 18th and 19th century they used an
instrument called sexant by which they determined the postion.
SEGMENTS OF GPS SYSTEM
The GPS navigation system is a collection of 3 components :
A. Space Segment-
The Space is a collection of 24 Interconnected Satellites orbiting at an altitude of about
20200km.Each Satiate circles the Earth twice a day.
They are arranged into six equally spaced orbital planes surrounding the earth
Each planes consists of 4 satellites .This arrangement makes sure that user can connect to 24
Satiates at any time on the planet.
CONTROL SEGMENT
The GPS control segment consists of a global network of ground facilities that track the GPS satellites,
monitor their transmissions, perform analyses, and send commands and data to the constellation.
The current Operational Control Segment (OCS) includes a master control station, an alternate master control
station, 11 command and control antennas, and 16 monitoring sites.
There are 3 Elements of the Control Segment
1. Moniter Stations- The role of The Monitor Station is to
Track GPS satellites as they pass overhead
They also Collect navigation signals, range/carrier measurements, and atmospheric data
Feed observations to the master control station
2. Master Control Station - The role of The Mater Control Station is to
Provides command and control of the GPS constellation
Generates navigation messages for upload to the satellites
Monitors satellite broadcasts to ensure constellation health and accuracy
3.Ground Antennas
Send commands, navigation data uploads, and processor program loads to the satellites
Collect telemetry
Comunicate via S band and perform s band ranging to provide satellite support
USER SEGMENT
ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF GPS
Advantages of GPS
GPS costs you very low as compared other navigation systems.
Most attraction of this technique is its100% coverage on earth.
Due to its low cost, it’s very easy to integrate into other technologies like telephone.
GPS Works in all weathers and has no environmental barrier
Gps technology is used in military to improve the accuracy of the missiles launched with the help of the coordinates
Disadvantages of GPS
1. Gps connectivity may be low in the countryside or village side as it has no local knowledge
2. Gps chip in your mobile may use lots of power and drain your phones battery in 8-10 hours
3.
TRIANGULATION
TRIALTERATION
There are many Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites orbiting the Earth. These are used to locate your position on the planet. GPS
positioning works on fairly simple principles, but the installation and application of such a system requires incredible precision.
Two main mathematical ideas underpin the GPS positioning network. Trilateration is the first concept and it is based on finding the position of a GPS
device from three distances.
The second idea is the relationship between the speed of the signal (speed of light, c = 299,792,458ms-1), the time taken for the signal to travel and the
distance travelled.
Trilateration works by finding your position on Earth once the location of GPS satellites orbiting the Earthand their distance from your location are known. Since we cannot
physically measure the distance of these satellites directly, we need to use the known speed of the signal sent by the
GPS satellites and the time the signals were sent. This is quite easy, because satellites send out electromagnetic signals constantly. If our GPS receiver detected the signal from only
one satellite, all we could tell is that we could be anywhere on the surface of a sphere of radius equal to the calculated distance from the satellite.
If we only received signals from two satellites (satellite A and B, for example), we could tell that we are somewhere along the circle drawn by the intersections of the spheres
described by the two signals.
But with a third satellite signal we can tell the exact location of our device, because the three spheres will intersect in one point only. We can simplify this concept in 2D, using
circles rather than sphere
DIJIKAATRA ALGORITHM
A Dutch computer scientist, Edsger Dijkstra, in 1959, proposed an algorithm that can be applied to a weighted graph. The graph can e
be directed or undirected with the condition that the graph needs to embrace a non-negative value on its every edge. He named
algorithm “Dijkstra’s Algorithm” at his name.
In simple words, graphs are data structures that are used to depict connections amidst a couple of elements where these elements are ca
nodes (or vertex) that generally real-time objects, persons or entities and connections amid nodes are termed as edges. Also, two nodes o
get connected if there is an edge between them.
Graphs can be divided into two parts
1. Undirected graphs - If we can move from one side to another node in both directions then it is called a undirected graph.
2.
