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April 2021: The prevalence of unmanned aerial vehicles has caused a plethora of safety and regulatory problems in recent years, which is why several companies are developing counter-UAV technologies. Some of these use kinetic methods to disable offending drones, but others use microwave radiation to either jam or disable the drones’ onboard electronics.  “A ray gun that can fry a drone’s […]

March 2021: GPS interference has been a worsening problem for the past decade, particularly for aviation. This article from IEEE spectrum covers current research efforts to detect and monitor GPS interference. Data from ADS-B and terrestrial GPS receivers offer a good start, but Dr. Humphreys explains that these sources are limited by sensor sparsity:  “There are fewer than 3000 GPS reference

January 2021: This recent article from The New York Times summarizes America’s extreme dependence on GPS and the resulting vulnerabilities. They credit Dr. Humphreys’s 2008 paper on GPS spoofing with bringing the weakness to light. When asked about the urgency of finding alternatives to GPS, Dr. Humphreys said “If we don’t get good backups on line, then GPS is

January 2021: FAA pilot reports have revealed that military tests are interfering with airline flights. The military is presumably generating GPS interference to test their latest positioning technology, but the interference is reaching beyond the test sites and jamming passenger aircraft that routinely rely on GPS for navigation and landing. Although pilots are trained for such scenarios, the loss

October 2020: Check out our videos page for an update on the Radionavigation Lab’s research! We’ve been working hard to produce short video summaries of our recent papers. Enjoy! Multi-Antenna Vision-and-Inertial Aided CDGNSS for Micro Aerial Vehicle Pose Estimation Fused LEO GNSS Vehicle Sensorium Demonstration Open-World Virtual Reality Headset Tracking Game-Theoretic Counter-UAV for Real-World Situations All-Weather sub-50-cm

October 2020: This recent article from BBC explores the modern world’s dependence on GPS and some possible position, navigation, and timing alternatives. We depend on GPS for everything from turn-by-turn navigation to banking transactions, but the system has some critical vulnerabilities to jamming and spoofing. “There is a growing recognition of the need to protect, toughen, and augment

October 2020: Dr. Peter Iannucci’s recently-submitted paper, Fused Low-Earth-Orbit GNSS, was highlighted in the MIT technology review for its expected impact on the US Army’s navigation technologies. The paper proposes to leverage low-earth-orbit internet constellations, like SpaceX’s Starlink, to provide strong, jam-resistant positioning signals that augment the existing GPS. The need for this augmentation is emphasized by the

September 2020: The Department of Transportation recently allocated nearly 2 million dollars to fund a new University Transportation Center (UTC) whose members include Ohio State University, the University of California Irvine, and the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Zak Kassas, an RNL alumnus, is the Principal Investigator of the overall multi-university center. Dr. Humphreys will lead

September 2020: NASA recently started accepting commercial contracts for missions to the International Space Station (ISS). Initially intended to make the ISS more accessible to scientific companies, the new initiative is attracting unexpected clients. NASA astronauts will soon be tasked with filming cosmetics commercials and transporting souvenirs. Dr. Todd Humphreys comments on this development, saying “If the

August 2020: Dr. Todd Humphreys’s groundbreaking work in GPS over the past decade was featured in this article from the New Yorker. The article offers a charming summary of Dr. Humphreys’s career and the Radionavigation Lab’s GPS-related research.