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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.

June 2020: Ships thousands of miles at sea are mysteriously reporting GPS positions near Point Reyes, which is off the coast of San Francisco. Dr. Todd Humphreys believes that this is part of the worldwide maritime spoofing that he has been studying over the past few years. “I think we’re witnessing […] the emergence of commodity off-the-shelf spoofing

June 2020: Maritime GPS spoofing is a worldwide puzzle, and researchers have yet to uncover the motivation behind the spoofing. Until recently, spoofing signals were always broadcast over large areas to affect many ships. It now seems that spoofing has become more targeted; sometimes only one ship is affected. This suggests that new, low-power spoofing

June 2020: Dr. Todd Humphreys was invited to the Hexagon | NovAtel® offices in March 2020 to give a presentation on the Radionavigation Lab’s recent research. Read the blog post on their website here. In his presentation, titled “All-Weather Localization and Positioning for Self-Driving Cars,” Dr. Humphreys covers material from two of the Lab’s recent papers: Deep Urban Unaided Precise

June 2020: Lakshay Narula (center), Peter Iannucci (right), and Todd Humphreys (left) were awarded the Walter R. Fried Memorial Award for the best overall paper at the 2020 IEEE/ION PLANSx conference. Their paper, titled “Automotive-Radar-Based 50-cm Urban Positioning,” presents a novel method of radar localization for autonomous vehicles in urban environments. Congratulations to the authors!

May 2020: As part of his recent paper for the IEEE/ION PLANSx conference, Lakshay Narula published an extensive dataset for urban positioning, called TEX-CUP: The University of Texas Challenge for Urban Positioning. “Mass-market precise GNSS positioning is being researched now more than ever”, Lakshay says. “To make progress as a research community, we need to evaluate new techniques on