From SpaceX to Reinventing GPS: Solving the ‘Solved Problem’ with Brian Manning

Many people consider GPS a solved problem.

It's ubiquitous.

Most of us don't think about it.

It's used across our civil lives on our devices in defense.

What insight did you have which made you say, well, no, this is not a perfect solution.

There's gaps in this product.

and this is a this is the problem you want to solve

for sure so where this came from for me was was talking to um our cto tyler um the first time we got brought up was like well you know tyler's doing this thing where they're looking at building a new gps and i had kind of the same response like why like gps is is fine um like that doesn't really need it anything and i was over doing an mba in london at the time like well got some free time let's dig into this and actually take a look and started kind of peeling back the layers on it like okay i didn't realize that there's you know seven billion gps devices on the planet like there's soon gonna be more gps devices on the planet than people so like okay there's no shortage in the market size here um but do those devices actually need or want anything better And so, okay, let's start to look at where they're used.

And the original core area where Tyler had identified, he was working at Ford in their autonomous vehicle group.

And if you look at what's happening in the automotive world, which is a proxy of what's happening in a lot of just the physical AI world is the term for it these days.

Things are transitioning from a hands-on model to a hands-off model.

And so from an automotive standpoint, a GPS is good enough to tell a human driver what road they're on to an acceptable level of reliability.

And most people experience the, okay, well, I'm on the on-ramp, but I'm not on the on-ramp, but I can tell I'm not on the off-ramp.

It snaps back eventually and you can handle it because you're human.

When you're moving into machine control, the tolerance for being wrong and the consequences of being wrong are massively larger.

And so from a navigation standpoint, you know, we need a location system that goes from, I kind of know what road I'm on to, I have extremely high confidence in what lane I'm in.

And even if I'm in the center of that lane and this is just, that's kind of where I started to see the gap here of.

Technologies like autonomous vehicles have so much potential.

There's so many exciting things, but for them to actually go from being a luxury good, you know, the luxury thing that it's, can get you around downtown San Francisco, which is cool, to actually being the default mode of transportation in the world.

And if you look at back home where I'm from in Michigan, where the roads are covered in snow and salt and the cars are covered in dirt, what I get more excited about is, okay, how do we get to the point where the autonomous ambulance can get through the snowstorm that a human driver couldn't get through or wouldn't be safe to get through? And to do that, we just need a lot better capabilities than adding more cameras and adding more things.

You need very trusted location and that that really translates out into the rest of the world too that it's not just automotive that you start realizing agriculture has the same challenges and how can you get autonomous operation of robots and things like that out in the field but to do that they need to know where they're at and whether this is drones or aerial mobility or agriculture or even IoT devices.

They say the foundation of it is the thing needs to know where it's at.

Yeah.

And more and more they're ending up inside, you know, the back of a truck or inside of a warehouse or inside of a house where GPS can't get to.

And so we start to look across the world.