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 just a soft rib of ours, and we could be punched here very quickly."
The article underscores several of the Radionavigation Lab's research areas, including Russian GPS interference and maritime GPS spoofing.
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 of GPS is so rare that it can still cause disorientation and confusion in the cockpit. In this article from IEEE Spectrum, Dr. Humphreys explains:
"I don’t blame pilots for getting a little addicted to GPS. When something works well 99.99 percent of the time, humans don’t do well in being vigilant for that 0.01 percent of the time that it doesn’t."
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 Radar-Inertial Positioning
- A Proposal for Securing Terrestrial Radio-Navigation Systems
- Long Range, Low SWaP-C FMCW Radar