In his Presidential Address at the 53rd Annual General Meeting of the Institute, held in London on 20 October 1999, Air Commodore ‘Pinky’ Grocott reviewed the deliberations and findings of the second Way Ahead Group in 1992, reflected on the continued relevance of the Group's recommendations after seven years and considered the progress made by the Institute in this period.

This paper, and the following five papers, were presented during the Telematics Automotive 99 Conference held at the National Exhibition Centre, Birmingham, 13th to 15th April 1999. This first paper sets the scene for the more detailed technical aspects of the later papers. Copies of the full proceedings of Telematics Automotive 99 are available on loan from The Cundall Library.

Globalisation of both markets and supply has been nowhere more obvious than in motor cars. These vehicles create not only the most free economic pipeline known to man but also a revolution in personal freedom. They are unlikely to go away; we have to find ways of living with them by coping with the environmental problems and the many forms of traffic problem: congestion, driving and support skills and car crime. In other areas, notably manufacturing and commerce, automation and advanced communications have enabled radical improvements in quality, productivity and environmental impact. This effect has yet to reach road transport in volume; the environmental and traffic problems are growing at least as fast as the populations of vehicles grow. The risk with such an important enabler as telematics is that it is seen as a plaything for gadget-minded users, rather than a key enabler for ongoing use of the car in the face of unrelenting pressures of congestion and environmental damage.

Communications with vehicles has come a long way since 1979, when drivers made ‘check calls’ from roadside telephone boxes. With the advent of mobile phones, fleet managers were able to contact their drivers, whenever they wanted – well almost. But talking requires two people to be available at the same time. Usually the driver does not concentrate, because he is driving, and has to call back – more charges, and when did you last record a phone conversation? Now, satellite communication allows transmission of vehicle position and data. Messages sent to vehicles are stored in the vehicle (and by the sender). Messages sent to the office are stored at the office. Neither messages or positions can be intercepted. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate why the ‘key to better fleet management’ is in integrating data from messages with other systems. Pre-formed messages requiring only the ‘blanks’ to be filled bring standardisation to the system. Message fields can be formatted so that specific data may be collected and posted to other software packages. Users of such systems report savings in manpower by reducing duplication of work e.g.: a message confirming the delivery of a consignment, sent by the driver, is posted to the accounts system and an invoice raised automatically. The future includes transmission of bar codes, signatures on PODs (proof of delivery notes) and viewing of consignment positions, by customers, on the Internet. The conclusion must be that – in the battle for survival, where making profit can sometimes depend on saving costs – it will be those companies that embrace technology to link all their systems so as to exchange data, who will win out.

Cellnet/British Telecom (BT) has been active in the area of GPS/GSM location and application research for over five years. Cellnet/BT have undertaken considerable development and field trials of various GSM methods for location positioning, which have resulted in several patent registrations. Recent R&D projects undertaken by the Mobility engineering team at BT Labs. include MOSA (Mobile Social Alarm) and City Guide using GPS positioning data to deliver value-added applications and services for both the general public and business users. A critical factor to the successful development of innovative value-added services is co-operation with partners, to promote and evolve open standards for GSM location.

Advanced vehicle navigation based on the US Global Positioning Systems (GPS) will play a major role in future vehicle control systems. Contemporary vehicle navigation systems generally consist of vehicle positioning using satellites and location and orientation of the vehicle with respect to the roadway geometry using a digitised map on a CD-ROM. The standard GPS (with Selective Availability) enables positioning with an accuracy of at least 100 m and is sufficiently accurate for most route guidance tasks. More accurate, precision navigation can be obtained by Differential GPS techniques. A new light concept called Adaptive Light Control (ALC) has been developed with the aim to improve night-time traffic safety. ALC improves the headlamp illumination by means of continuous adaptation of the headlamps according to the current driving situation and current environment. In order to ensure rapid prototyping and early testing, the step from offline to online (real-time) simulation of light distributions has been successfully completed in the driving simulator. The solutions are directly ported to real vehicles to allow further testing with natural road conditions.

Conventional cruise control systems fulfil the function of automatic speed control. A desired speed is selected by the driver, and a control system operates on the throttle to maintain this desired speed. When traffic density is moderate or high, the driver is faced with having to adjust the set speed regularly in order to maintain a comfortable distance from preceding vehicles and will frequently have to brake, disengaging the cruise control. Thus conventional cruise control can become a source of irritation when used in moderate or heavy traffic. If a distance sensor is added to a conventional cruise control system, then it is possible to add distance keeping to the basic speed control function. This forms the basis for adaptive cruise control, which can be further improved if a limited authority braking system is incorporated. Use can then be made of both throttle and brake actuators to control the distance and relative velocities between a vehicle and a preceding target vehicle.

The idea of incorporating radar systems into vehicles to improve road traffic safety dates back to the 1970s. Such systems are now reaching the market as recent advances in technology have allowed the signal processing requirements and the high angular resolution requirements from physically small antennas to be realised. Automotive radar systems have the potential for a number of different applications including adaptive cruise control (ACC) and anti-collision devices. This paper summarises recent developments in test methods that have been made to satisfy the compliance requirements for emissions and immunity.

This paper, and the following 5 papers, were first presented at a Symposium on ‘Advanced Moving-Map Displays’ held on the 3rd and 4th of August 1999 at the US Naval Research Laboratory Detachment at the NASA Stennis Space Centre, Mississippi and are reproduced in modified form with the kind permission of the NRL Commanding Officer, Captain Douglas H. Rau USN.

The role of human factors in map design is to serve as a mediator between the technology availed by electronic digital maps (particularly vector maps) on the one hand, and the many tasks performed by the user on the other. Simply put, no one map is best suited for all tasks. The appropriate mapping of map to task is, in turn, mediated by a series of information processing principles, articulated by the engineering psychologist. The field is on the threshold of being able to provide computational models, based on these principles, that will provide guidance to the map designer as to the circumstances that make one map format better than another for a particular application. This paper describes these principles as applied to two domains of vector map design: the domain of three-dimensional maps, and the domain of database overlay.

One approach to increasing the area coverage of small-screen map displays is to exploit the ‘elasticity’ of the electronic display through use of non-linear scaling. Although resolution is necessarily lost in areas of smaller scale, bitmap images lose important information when re- scaled. This can render features unrecognisable and text unreadable. Vector maps are more tolerant to non-linear scaling because critical position information found in vertices of lines is distorted without being lost. Examples of non-linear scaling are presented to demonstrate the effect on bitmap and vector images. Ongoing research examining the user performance benefits of non-linear displays is also described.

Although numerous at smaller geographic scales, vector databases often do not exist at the more detailed, larger scales. A possible solution is the use of image processing techniques to detect edges in high-resolution satellite imagery. Features such as roads and airports are formed from the edges and matched up with similar features in existing low-resolution vector map databases. By replacing the old features with the new more accurate features, the resolution of the existing map database is improved. To accomplish this, a robust edge detection algorithm is needed that will perform well in noisy conditions. This paper studies and tests one such method, the Wavelet Multi-scale Edge Detector. The wavelet transform breaks down a signal into frequency bands at different levels. Noise present at lower scales smoothes out at higher levels. It is demonstrated that this property can be used to detect edges in noisy satellite imagery. Once edges are located, a new method will be proposed for storing these edges geographically so that features can be formed and paired with existing features in a vector map database.

Vector map databases offer the potential for customised cockpit moving-map displays, in which user-specified cartographic features can be layered to meet mission requirements. The disadvantage of vector moving-maps is the potential for increased user workload. In 1995, the Naval Research Laboratory and the Naval Air Weapons Center jointly performed a preference study, during which aircrew viewed demonstrations of prototype moving-map displays and responded to a detailed questionnaire concerning the usefulness of each display. This paper summarises aircrew interviews from that study pertaining to both vector moving-map displays and vector feature overlays, including Height-Above-Threshold (HAT), threat rings, and Clear Line-of-Sight (CLOS).

Vector-based maps are an advanced capability of digital moving-map systems that are easily customised and can be powerful aids to aircrew information processing and decision-making. However, they may place excessive demands on an aircrew's information processing requirements, cause an increase in workload, and degrade situational awareness if the user interface is not designed properly. There is little information available about the human factors and situational awareness issues relevant to vector-based maps. In this paper, we summarise relevant research on human factors and situational awareness aspects of using vector-based maps, identify key issues, and recommend directions for future research.

Many issues related to incorporating real-time spatial information within Geographic Information Systems (GIS) need to be investigated. It can be established that the concept of real-time in relation to the input, analysis, display, and output of complex spatial information depends directly on specific user applications. This dependency has been evident throughout the Naval Research Laboratory's development of a real-time GIS for hydrographic surveys. This paper contrasts the issues and requirements observed for this application with those of vector moving-map displays for high-speed aeronautical applications. It also attempts to quantify the influence of various factors and impacts affecting real-time response to specialised applications like vector moving-map displays.

Several military and commercial platforms are currently installing GPS and inertial navigation sensors concurrently with the introduction of high-quality visual capabilities and digital mapping/imagery databases. This enables autonomous geo-registration of sensor imagery using GPS/inertial position and attitude data, and also permits data from digital mapping products to be overlaid automatically on the sensor imagery. This paper describes the system architecture for a Navigation/Electro-Optic Sensor Integration Technology (NEOSIT) software application. The design is highly modular and based on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) tools to facilitate integration with sensors, navigation and digital data sources already installed on different host platforms.

This paper concerns the derivation of a formula to follow geographically fixed turns in a homogeneous current or tidal stream. Until now, various well-founded but limited approximations have been used. In principle, all these approximations are based on the formula v = ω × R. One result of this research is the development and use of a fast-time simulation program. The initial aim was to illustrate to trainees the consequences and, in particular, the possible dangers of these approximations. The fast-time simulation program can be used in support of real-time simulation. Comparisons with real-time simulations carried out by the Dutch Pilots' Corporation (STODEL) indicate that the fast-time simulations generate turning-circle diameters that differ by a maximum 4 percent. The relationship with path-prediction is also dealt with. The possibility of applying the developed formulae in practice and for passage planning is currently under investigation. The fast-time simulation program has not been developed for one specific ship: apart from the use of an assumed position of the pivoting point at 1/3 of the ship's length from the bow, it does not take hydrodynamic effects into account.

This paper was first published in Astronomy and Geophysics (December 1998, Vol. 39) by the Royal Astronomical Society and the Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd and is reproduced here, with minor amendments, by kind permission of the Editor, Dr Sue Bowler.

William Wales (1734–1798) contributed to astronomy through his observations of the 1769 transit of Venus, and his studies of latitude and longitude on Captain James Cook's second voyage to the South Seas. During this voyage, Wales was responsible for monitoring the performance of the chronometers. After returning from the Pacific, Wales took charge of the Royal Mathematical School at Christ's Hospital in London and, over the next two decades, he taught a succession of budding officers the principles of navigation.

This paper develops a quantitative model for evaluating the difficulty of ship-handling caused by a restricted manoeuvring area or by traffic congestion or by a combination of both. It includes acceptance criteria based on the mariner's perception of safety. An attempt is made to evaluate the model by applying it to the specific environmental conditions of major ports in Japan. The model can provide information on the degree of ship-handling difficulty and so enable better design of infrastructure for waterways.

Following on from an earlier paper, the authors have analysed some of the options available to mariners who are faced with taking avoiding action in multiple encounters and have considered the effect of these options on manoeuvre distance.

This paper compares the differences between the rhumbline courses and distances calculated by three methods: the classical formula, precise formula and by software contained in a typical GPS receiver. It concludes that, while the calculations made by the GPS receiver are generally more accurate than the classical method, navigators must use Tables of Latitude Parts to calculate rhumbline distances accurately.