GPS is very accurate, but still not 100%, especially for civilian/commercial purposes.
Typically, when a vehicle is moving, we get it within 5 feet of accuracy.
When a vehicle sits still for some time, tracking devices (all of them) typically experience “GPS Drift” of up to 25 feet or so.
However, GPS Insight fixes and insulates our customers from this inaccuracy and I will show you how in this article:
This is what GPS Drift it looks like using a version of our mapping which only our support staff has access to — this particular map shows how long each individual point takes to make it into our database, and also shows every single reported point, and I use it make this “GPS drift” evident:
These are roughly 24 points which bounce around up to 25 feet from the center (they are 30 second updates for 12 minutes while my wife & family waited for me to get a few things from the office on our way home tonight):
All of these points were in our database within 4 seconds of them being registered by the GPS device (in this case, a GPSI-4000 at 30 second updates).
However, we “consolidate” them into a single, highly accurate 12 minute idle stop, which shows precisely where we parked the vehicle and let it run for 12 minutes — the parking lot is practically empty and we parked in the 2nd space:
To show what our customers see, I run a typical 3D history map to compare:
And we only see one “pin” where my vehicle truly parked for 12 minutes:
Note the “lighter/thinner” red line from earlier in the day (where I drove through the ATM at the bank to our North earlier). We show activity in this way to help easily determine direction and time of travel with the “path” which exists below the individual location “pins” which we show.
Here I have zoomed out a bit, and we see this 2 minute idle stop (at the ATM drive through), 5 1/2 hours prior to coming back to that area (it’s a long drive to Tortilla Flat):
The light/thin to dark/thick lines are another way we help customers gain easy insight into their fleet activity.
Here is my vehicle (Rob 4000) and Brent’s — it is immediately apparent by looking at the line thickness/color what direction of travel I took to the office, then back home (by way of the post office) today. It is trivial to see that Brent drove in the direction of travel from light/thin to darker/thicker.
These are the types of things which you might not immediately notice with GPS Insight. Things just “work” the way they should. But behind the scenes, we are processing and filtering and consolidating and sanity checking millions of points per day for our customers to make sure they see sensible data and can use that to bring efficiency and insight to their businesses. We take advice on usability from customers all the time, and encourage them to provide feedback to help better the product.
I just happened to run a map tonight for a different reason (we were testing a different unit) and I noticed this idling activity. I thought it would be a good time to detail how we do these two (of many) convenient map enhancements for our customers.
By the way, here is an iPhone pic of where we were at with the kids (’Tortilla Flat’ — an old mining town/tourist trap in Apache Junction):
It is a beautiful area near the Superstition Mountains — we thought the drive would be nice on this Memorial Day weekend. I’ve had better food before though…
Note the hitching post where people tie their horses up when they can eat at the Saloon.
We don’t have GPS or diagnostics for horses, and note they left different types of “emissions.”
Rob.