Geographic locator of a vehicle using GPS and angles between pairs of adjacent boundary coordinate points
First Claim
1. A system for determining which of a plurality of geographic entities a vehicle is in, wherein each of said entities is defined by a closed path boundary represented by a set of ordered discrete coordinate points, said system comprising:
- a position determining system for generating present vehicle position information including a coordinate data point for said vehicle;
receiver means installed on said vehicle for receiving said present vehicle position information;
a memory device containing information including said ordered coordinate points for each of said plurality of entities; and
processor means for selecting a set of entities from said plurality of entities and for each entity in said set, adding the angles formed between lines extending from said vehicle position coordinate data point to each adjacent pair of discrete coordinate points representing said closed path boundary to obtain a summation and for identifying the entity for which said summation yields a non-zero result.
2 Assignments
0 Petitions
Accused Products
Abstract
A system and method for using coordinate data indicative of the present location of a vehicle to determine which state the vehicle is in. A receiver obtains the coordinate data and compares it to state boundary coordinate information stored in memory. The angles created by the present coordinate location and each pair of adjacent points along a state'"'"'s boundary are added. A resulting sum of two times pi (radians) indicates that the present state falls within the state boundary, a result of zero indicates otherwise.
-
Citations
15 Claims
-
1. A system for determining which of a plurality of geographic entities a vehicle is in, wherein each of said entities is defined by a closed path boundary represented by a set of ordered discrete coordinate points, said system comprising:
-
a position determining system for generating present vehicle position information including a coordinate data point for said vehicle; receiver means installed on said vehicle for receiving said present vehicle position information; a memory device containing information including said ordered coordinate points for each of said plurality of entities; and processor means for selecting a set of entities from said plurality of entities and for each entity in said set, adding the angles formed between lines extending from said vehicle position coordinate data point to each adjacent pair of discrete coordinate points representing said closed path boundary to obtain a summation and for identifying the entity for which said summation yields a non-zero result. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)
-
-
9. A method of determining which of a plurality of geographic entities a vehicle is in wherein each of said entities is defined by a closed path boundary represented by a set of ordered discrete coordinate points lying substantially on said boundary, said method comprising the steps of:
-
(a) storing coordinate boundary points for each said entity in a memory, said stored points being associated with the entity boundary defined thereby; (b) obtaining a coordinate data point indicative of the present geographic position of said vehicle; (c) for one set of entity boundary coordinates, finding the included angle between lines extending from the current position coordinate point and each pair of adjacent boundary coordinate points and summing said included angles; and (d) repeating step (c) for different sets of entity boundary coordinates until said summation yields a nonzero result. - View Dependent Claims (10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15)
-
Specification