## Ergebnisse der Monats-Archivsuche

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• ## Read GPS logs from a Canmore GT-740FL on Linux using gpsbabel

I recent­ly bought a Can­more GT-740FL GPS log­ger (labeled Sport Log­Book 740FL GPS on Ama­zon) and found in a review that it can be read out with gpsbabel using the skytraq for­mat (“Sky­Traq Venus based log­gers (down­load)”). That mode’s doc­u­men­ta­tion states that the GT-750FL can be read out, which is indeed true as well for the GT-740FL (despite being a SiRF­s­tar IV device).

On my Ubun­tu box, the log­ger is avail­able as an ACM device (basi­cal­ly a Hayes-style modem) under /dev/ttyACM0; check dmesg | grep tty to be sure.

Here’s the com­mand line to down­load all tracks in GPX for­mat into a tracks.gpx file.

sudo gpsbabel -i skytraq,baud=115200 -f /dev/ttyACM0 \
-o gpx -F tracks.gpx


It seems though that gpsbabel down­loads every­thing as a sin­gle track (except for man­u­al way­points, of course). Some sources sug­gest using baud=38400,initbaud=4800 instead of the 115200 baud option above when using Win­dows (and for the 730FL, to be exact); I didn’t test that, how­ev­er, as 115.2 kbaud worked fine for me.

To also delete the tracks, you may append the erase option or sim­ply delete all tracks with­out down­load­ing using -i skytraq,erase,no-output.

If you’d like to see live GPS data you may use minicom, e.g. with

sudo minicom -b 115200 -D /dev/ttyACM0


Use CTRL-A, Z to open minicom’s menu, then X to exit.

• ## Naismith, Aitken-Langmuir, Tranter and Tobler: Modeling hiking speed

While plan­ning an eleven-day trekking trip through the Hardan­gervid­da in Nor­way, I came across the age old prob­lem of esti­mat­ing the walk­ing time for a giv­en path on the map. While one is eas­i­ly able to deter­mine the times for the main west-east and north-south routes from a trav­el guide, there sad­ly is no infor­ma­tion about those self-made prob­lems (i.e. cus­tom routes). Obvi­ous­ly, a sim­ple and cor­rect solu­tion needs to be found.

Of course, there is no such thing. When search­ing for hik­ing time rules, two can­di­dates pop up reg­u­lar­ly: Naismith’s rule (includ­ing Tranter’s cor­rec­tions), as well as Tobler’s hik­ing func­tion.

William W. Naismith’s rule — and I couldn’t find a sin­gle sci­en­tif­ic source — is more a rule of thumb than it is exact. It states:

For every 5 kilo­me­tres, allow one hour. For every 600 metres of ascend, add anoth­er hour.

\begin{align}
\theta &= \tan^{-1}(\frac{\Delta a}{\Delta s}) \\
t &= \Delta s \left( \frac{1\mathrm{h}}{5\mathrm{km}} \right) + \Delta a \left( \frac{1 \mathrm{h}}{0.6 \mathrm{km}} \right) \\
|\vec{w}| &= \frac{\Delta s}{t}
\end{align}

where $|\vec{w}|$ is the walk­ing speed, $\Delta s$ the length on the hor­i­zon­tal plane (i.e. “for­ward”), $\Delta a$ the ascend (i.e. the dif­fer­ence in height) and $\theta$ the slope.

function [w, t, slope] = naismith(length, ascend)
slope = ascend/length;
t = length*(1/5) + ascend*(1/0.6);
w = length./t;
end


That looks like

Inter­est­ing­ly, this implies that if you climb a 3 km moun­tain straight up, it will take you 5 hours. By recog­nis­ing that $5 \textrm{km} / 0.6 \textrm{km} \approx 8.3 \approx 8$ , the 8 to 1 rule can be employed, which allows the trans­for­ma­tion of any (Nai­smith-ish) track to a flat track by cal­cu­lat­ing

\begin{align}
\Delta s_{flat} &= \Delta s + \frac{5 \mathrm{km}}{0.6 \mathrm{km}} \cdot \Delta a\\
&\approx \Delta s + 8 \cdot \Delta a
\end{align}

So a track of $20 \textrm{km}$ in length with $1 \textrm{km}$ of ascend would make for $\mathrm{km} + 8 \cdot 1 \mathrm{km} = 28 \mathrm{km}$ of total track length. Assum­ing an aver­age walk­ing speed of $5 \mathrm{km/h}$ , that route will take $28 \mathrm{km} / 5 \mathrm{km/h} = 5.6 \mathrm{h}$ , or 5 hours and 36 min­utes. Although quite inac­cu­rate, some­body found this rule to be accu­rate enough when com­par­ing it against times of men run­ning down hills in Nor­way. Don’t quote me on that.

Robert Aitken assumed that 5 km/h might be too much and set­tled for 4 km/h on all off-track sur­faces. Unfor­tu­nate­ly the Nai­smith rule still didn’t state any­thing about descent or slopes in gen­er­al, so Eric Lang­muir added some refine­ments:

When walk­ing off-track, allow one hour for every 4 kilo­me­tres (instead of 5 km). When on a small decline of 5 to 12°, sub­tract 10 min­utes per 300 metres (1000 feet). For any steep­er decline (i.e. over 12°), add 10 min­utes per 300 metres of descent.

Now that’s the stuff won­der­ful­ly non-dif­fer­en­tiable func­tions are made of:

That is:

\begin{align}
\theta &= \tan^{-1}(\frac{\Delta a}{\Delta s}) \\
t &= \Delta s \left( \frac{1\mathrm{h}}{5\mathrm{km}} \right) + \begin{cases}
+\Delta a \left( \frac{1 \mathrm{h}}{0.6 \mathrm{km}} \right) , & \text{if $\theta > -5^\circ$} \\
-|\Delta a| \left( \frac{\left(10/60\right) \mathrm{h}}{0.3 \mathrm{km}} \right) , & \text{if $-12^\circ \le \theta \le -5^\circ$} \\
+|\Delta a| \left( \frac{\left(10/60\right) \mathrm{h}}{0.3 \mathrm{km}} \right) , & \text{if $\theta < -12^\circ$}
\end{cases} \\
|\vec{w}| &= \frac{\Delta s}{t}
\end{align}

It should be clear that 12 km/h is an high­ly unlike­ly speed, even on roads.

function [w, t, slope] = naismith_al(length, ascend, base_speed)
if ~exist('base_speed', 'var')
base_speed = 4; % km/h
end

slope = ascend/length;

t = length*(1/base_speed);
if slope >= 0
t = t + ascend*(1/0.6);
elseif atand(slope) <= -5 && atand(slope) >= -12
t = t - abs(ascend)*((10/60)/0.3);
elseif atand(slope) < -12
t = t + abs(ascend)*((10/60)/0.3);
end

w = length./t;
end


So Wal­do Tobler came along and devel­oped his “hik­ing func­tion”, an equa­tion that assumes a top speed of 6 km/h with an inter­est­ing fea­ture: It — though still indif­fer­en­tiable — adapts grace­ful­ly to the slope of the ground. That func­tion can be found in his 1993 report “Three pre­sen­ta­tions on geo­graph­i­cal analy­sis and mod­el­ing: Non-isotrop­ic geo­graph­ic mod­el­ing spec­u­la­tions on the geom­e­try of geog­ra­phy glob­al spa­tial analy­sis” and looks like the fol­low­ing:

It boils down to the fol­low­ing equa­tion of the walk­ing speed $|\vec{w}|$ “on foot­paths in hilly ter­rain” (with $s=1$ ) and “off-path trav­el” (with $s=0.6$ ):

\begin{align}
|\vec{w}| = s \cdot 6e^{-3.5 \cdot | \tan(\theta) + 0.05 |}
\end{align}

where $\tan(\theta)$ is the tan­gent of the slope (i.e. ver­ti­cal dis­tance over hor­i­zon­tal dis­tance). By tak­ing into account the exact slope of the ter­rain, this func­tion is supe­ri­or to Naismith’s rule and a much bet­ter alter­na­tive to the Lang­muir bug­fix, espe­cial­ly when used on GIS data.

function [w] = tobler(slope, scaling)
w = scaling*6*exp(-3.5 * abs(slope+0.05));
end


It how­ev­er lacks the one thing that makes the Nai­smith rule stand out: Tranter’s cor­rec­tions for fatigue and fit­ness. (Yes, I know it gets weird.) Sad­ly these cor­rec­tions seem to only exists in the form of a mys­ti­cal table that looks, basi­cal­ly, like that:

Fit­ness in min­utes Time in hours accord­ing to Naismith’s rule
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24
15 (very fit) 1 2 10 12½ 14½ 17 19½ 22 24
20 10 12½ 15 17½ 20 23
25 3 7 10 11½ 13¼ 15 17½
30 2 5 10½ 12½ 14½
40 11½
50 (unfit)

where the min­utes are a rather obscure mea­sure of how fast some­body is able to hike up 300 metres over a dis­tance of 800 metres ($20^\circ$). With that table the rule is: If you get into nas­ti­er ter­rain, drop one fit­ness lev­el. If you suck at walk­ing, drop a fit­ness lev­el. If you use a 20 kg back­pack, drop one lev­el. Sad­ly, there’s no equa­tion to be found, so I had to make up one myself.

hours   = [2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24];
fitness = [15, 20, 25, 30, 40, 50];
table   = [1,    1.5,  2,    2.75, 3.5, 4.5,  5.5,  6.75, 7.75,  10,   12.5, 14.5, 17,  19.5, 22, 24;
1.25, 2.25, 3.25, 4.5,  5.5, 6.7,  7.75, 8.75, 10,    12.5, 15,   17.5, 20,  23,  NaN, NaN;
1.5,  3,    4.25, 5.5,  7,   8.5,  10,   11.5, 13.25, 15,   17.5, NaN,  NaN, NaN, NaN, NaN;
2,    3.5,  5,    6.75, 8.5, 10.5, 12.5, 14.5, NaN,   NaN,  NaN,  NaN,  NaN, NaN, NaN, NaN;
2.75, 4.25, 5.75, 7.5,  9.5, 11.5, NaN,  NaN,  NaN,   NaN,  NaN,  NaN,  NaN, NaN, NaN, NaN;
3.25, 4.75, 6.5,  8.5,  NaN, NaN,  NaN,  NaN,  NaN,   NaN,  NaN,  NaN,  NaN, NaN, NaN, NaN];


By look­ing at the table and the mesh plot it seems that each time axis for a giv­en fit­ness is log­a­rith­mic.

I did a log-log plot and it turns out that the series not only appear to be log­a­rith­mic in time, but also in fit­ness. By deriv­ing the (log-log-)linear regres­sion for each series, the fol­low­ing equa­tions can be found:

\begin{align}
t_{15}(t) &= e^{1.35 \,ln(t) - 1.08} \\
t_{20}(t) &= e^{1.24 \,ln(t) - 0.55} \\
t_{25}(t) &= e^{1.25 \,ln(t) - 0.33} \\
t_{30}(t) &= e^{1.31 \,ln(t) - 0.21} \\
t_{40}(t) &= e^{1.14 \,ln(t) + 0.20} \\
t_{50}(t) &= e^{1.05 \,ln(t) + 0.44} \\
\end{align}

These ear­ly approx­i­ma­tions appear to be quite good, as can be seen in the fol­low­ing lin­ear plot. The last three lines $t_{30}$ , $t_{40}$ and $t_{50}$ how­ev­er begin to drift away. That’s expect­ed for the last two ones due to the small num­ber of sam­ples, but the $t_{30}$ line was irri­tat­ing.

My first assump­tion was that the $t_{40}$ and $t_{50}$ lines sim­ply are out­liers and that the real coef­fi­cient for the time vari­able is the (out­lier cor­rect­ed) mean of $1.2215 \pm 0.11207$ . This would imply, that the inter­sect coef­fi­cient is the vari­able for fit­ness.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, this only seems to make things bet­ter in the log-log plot, but makes them a lit­tle bit worse in the lin­ear world.

Equi-dis­tant inter­sect coef­fi­cients also did not do the trick. Well, well. In the end, I decid­ed to give the brute force method a chance and defined sev­er­al fit­ting func­tions for the use with genet­ic algo­rithm and pat­tern search solvers, includ­ing expo­nen­tial, third-order and sig­moidal forms. The best ver­sion I could come up with was

\begin{align} t_{corrected}(t, f) &= 0.31381 \,e^{1.2097 \,ln(t) + 0.81328 \,ln(f) - 1.7307} \end{align}

This func­tion results in a least squared error of about 21.35 hours over all data points. The fol­low­ing shows the orig­i­nal sur­face from the table and the syn­thet­ic sur­face from the func­tion.

A max­i­mum devi­a­tion of about 1 hour can be seen clear­ly in the fol­low­ing error plot for the $t_{30}$ line, which real­ly seems to be an out­lier.

For com­par­i­son (here’s the orig­i­nal table), this is the syn­thet­ic cor­rec­tion table:

Fit­ness in min­utes Time in hours accord­ing to Naismith’s rule
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24
15 (very fit) 2 10¼ 12¼ 14½ 16½ 18¾ 21¼ 23½
20 9 10¼ 12¾ 15½ 18¼ 21 23¾
25 3 4 8 10¾ 12¼ 15½ 18½
30 2 11 12½
40 6 11¾
50 (unfit) 3 5