Research Areas
Research at the Radionavigation Laboratory can be broadly categorized into five main areas: secure perception, software-defined radio, robust perception, precise mass-market mobility, and remote sensing.
Secure Perception

Robust Perception

- precise vision-based sensing, and
- massive signal-of-opportunity exploitation.
Software-Defined Radio

- GRID: A Software-Defined Radionavigation Receiver
- CASES: Connected Autonomous Space Environment Sensors
- The GPS Assimilator: A Method for Upgrading Existing GPS User Equipment to Improve Accuracy, Robustness, and Resistance to Spoofing
- Scintillation-Robust Carrier Phase Tracking
- FOTON: A Software-Defined, Compact, Low-Cost GPS Radio Occultation Sensor
Precise Mass-Market Mobility

- The GPS antennas on mobile handsets and tablets are little better than smashed paper clips. Their poor quality (15-20 dB below that of even a cheap patch antenna and dismal multipath mitigation) makes it extremely challenging to extract carrier phase measurements accurate enough for fast fixing of the integer ambiguities that arise in the carrier-phase differential technique. And mobile users are impatient: they may be persuaded to wait 30 seconds for a cm-accurate position fix, but only a resolute few would hold out for longer.
- Differential carrier-phase-based positioning is power hungry compared with standard code-phase positioning. On a mobile device, milliwatts matter.
- Lack of a killer app.
Remote Sensing

Public Datasets and Code

- TEX-CUP: The University of Texas Challenge for Urban Positioning
- Texas Spoofing Test Battery (TEXBAT)
- ATX Urban Positioning Challenge Dataset
- Cornell Scintillation Simulation Toolkit: This package allows the user to simulate ionospheric scintillation with a given S4 and τ0. Functions are written in Matlab and produce a data output file that can be input to a Spirent GPS Signal Simulator. This can be useful both for comparing multiple receivers when tracking under identical scintillation conditions, and for testing receiver performance under a wide range of scintillation severity. The simulator is based on the paper Humphreys, Todd E., et al. “Simulating ionosphere-induced scintillation for testing GPS receiver phase tracking loops.” IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing 3.4 (2009): 707-715.