UBER: Location and navigation using global positioning systems (GPS) is deeply embedded in our daily lives, and is particularly crucial to Uber’s services. To orchestrate quick, efficient pickups, our GPS technologies need to know the locations of matched riders and drivers, as well as provide navigation guidance from a driver’s current location to where the rider needs to be picked up, and then, to the rider’s chosen destination. For this process to work seamlessly, the location estimates for riders and drivers need to be as precise as possible.
Since the (literal!) launch of GPS in 1973, we have advanced our understanding of the world, experienced exponential growth in the computational power available to us, and developed powerful algorithms to model uncertainty from fields like robotics. While our lives have become increasingly dependent on GPS, the fundamentals of how GPS works have not changed that much, which leads to significant performance limitations. In our opinion, it is time to rethink some of the starting assumptions that were true in 1973 regarding where and how we use GPS, as well as the computational power and additional information we can bring to bear to improve it.
While GPS works well under clear skies, its location estimates can be wildly inaccurate (with a margin of error of 50 meters or more) when we need it the most: in densely populated and highly built-up urban areas, where many of our users are located. To overcome this challenge, we developed a software upgrade to GPS for Android which substantially improves location accuracy in urban environments via a client-server architecture that utilizes 3D maps and performs sophisticated probabilistic computations on GPS data available through Android’s GNSS APIs.
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