Although nowadays' navigation systems may seem more advanced, sophisticated, accurate and precise, there is a wide room for improvements for the future, as there are numerous issues/problems that can be fixed and features to enhance. Some of the problems experienced by today's navigation system is accuracy, since the accuracy of commercial GPS (such as in phones and trackers) ranges from 10 to 100 meters from the location, which is a very huge margin that can lead to multiple mishaps, such as accidents, collisions and loss of tracking. Major incidents which highlight this problem are plane to drone encounters and near collisions, as in the present year there have been hundreds of reports filed mentioning near-collision encounters of drones and planes, which may have resulted in a great catastrophe, especially if the drone enters the plane's engine. According to a major drone to plane near-collision incident that occurred near Paris on February 19, 2016, it is mentioned that a drone came within 5 meters of a near-catastrophic collision scenario. The BEA (French air-accident investigator), confirmed that the plane's navigation system did not detect the minuscule drone encounter, and the pilot's quick reaction of disabling autopilot and steering the plane to safety, saved the flight and its passengers. This proves in real-life application that our current level of accuracy for navigation systems are very low and inadequate for detecting small objects, that might cause a fatal collision. Additionally, our current navigation system (such as GPS) may not be accurate because of impeding physical factors, such as in dense foliage or forests, caves and concealed spaces, and deep slot canyons, which are the most crucial time GPS' accuracy is required, as getting stuck in these situations/environments might be life-threatening and deadly without the help of GPS' accuracy.
The solutions to the major problem of accuracy in our current navigation system is through the enhancement of accuracy and precision, of satellites and GPS receivers. The first solution is to increase the number of satellites in orbit, which are used in the triangulation method to provide a more accurate and precise calculation of one's current location and destination. Increasing the number of satellites significantly correlates with increasing the accuracy of the navigation system, as the more the satellites focusing on one specific target, the more accurately the coordinates and position of the target is triangulated. Subsequently, the atomic clock present inside satellites could be improved to increase accuracy, since the current atomic clock present in the GPS satellites are only stable to "one part in 10 to the power of 15", and there is room for increasing the clock's accuracy, which can contribute to the satellites calculation of triangulation. Finally, the GPS receiver's accuracy could be significantly increased (such as phones, computers,etc.) since the receiver plays a major role in the reception of the signals sent from multiple satellites, and so GPS chipsets and antennas present in gadgets could be improved to effectively get the clearest and most accurate result from the signals from space.
The latest emerging invention/innovation in the navigation system field are improving and solving the issue of accuracy, and the technology that are yet to come are creating breakthroughs in the field of navigation. First of all, numerous agencies such as the European Space Agency are building more and more satellites for increased triangulation effectiveness, and their latest working project is called Galileo, which would be fully functional by the year 2020. Secondly, the latest technology NASA is working on is RACE (Rubidium Atomic Clock Experiment), this atomic clock is far more accurate than its predecessor, as it is stable to a fractional accuracy of "one part in 10 to the power of 17", and this atomic clock would keep time so precisely that if it worked for three billion years, it would lose less than a second. Also NASA is not only working on this type of atomic clock, but also on PARCS, ACES, and SUMO. This advancement in atomic clock technology would significantly increase the accuracy of satellites' triangulation and would hence produce more accurate results. Finally, various institutions such as University of Texas in Austin, are enhancing GPS technologies to receive the most optimum results. Their latest technology significantly revolutionizes the accuracy of GPS as the researchers in the university claimed that they are solving accuracy issues and reducing precision errors from the size of large cars to the size of a nickel, which is approximately 100 times increase in accuracy.