Spotlight

January 2026: Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin are finding new ways to relieve the sprawling, congested infrastructure surrounding the Forty Acres home to UT. Waymo and Robotaxi services, as well as CapMetro’s nascent self-driving transit buses, are some of the methods being deployed to encourage ridesharing and public transport.

The RNL has developed methods of reliable navigation for autonomous vehicles. This enhanced awareness can improve cooperative maneuvers, such as zipper merges, to speeds impossible for human drivers. “Tight automated zipper merging mimics what water molecules would do as they encounter a bottleneck: fuse together in one stream and speed up, not down, to allow a continual flow,” the RNL’s Dr. Todd Humphreys said.

To learn more about the University of Texas’ contributions to analyzing and managing traffic, read here.

November 2025: Since mid-November, electromagnetic interference has descended on the Caribbean. Amid a U.S. military buildup in the area—including attacks on alleged drug-running boats—the U.S. FAA has issued a critical warning to commercial pilots. Many commercial aviation navigation systems still rely on the traditional L1 GPS signal now threatened by increased interference. “Aviation receivers are often 20 years old,” said the RNL’s Dr. Todd Humphreys. “L5 would be a big help here, given the wider band frequency.” Furthermore, according to Dr. Humphreys, GPS interference can affect satellites in LEO, such as the Starlink and OneWeb constellations.

Experts tie the jamming to military actions in the region, as modern naval fleets often employ GPS jamming in conflict. “A carrier strike group is susceptible to attacks from large swarms of drones,” Humphreys said, and is an important consideration to both Venezuelan and U.S. naval assets.

For more, read the Bloomberg article here.

November 2025: Congratulations to Alperen Duru for receiving the Best Poster award at the Brooklyn 6G Summit!

6G will have AI applications and optimization as a core component. However, these implementations require dataset collection from the environment, which may be site-specific. Digital twins can help generate synthetic datasets for such AI implementations for deployment in reality, tuned with little environmental data. However, digital twins do not readily exist currently, requiring either generation from scratch or calibration from the available datasets. This study demonstrates two main views of modern digital twins:

(1) How do coarse, but readily-available geometry maps propagate their geometric uncertainties to channel estimation uncertainties?

(2) How can an extended reality (XR), equipped with accurate position & orientation estimates, help calibrate such a map geometry?

October 2025: A strong, repetitive radio signal has been interfering with GNSS signals across Europe as far back as 2019.

The BBC’s Science in Action was interested in learning more. “This is the main finding of my student Zach Clements’s work,” the RNL’s Dr. Todd Humphreys responded, “where he’s determined with a high degree of certainty that the interference we’ve noticed… is coming from space.” Zach Clements, a PhD student in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin and RNL researcher, presented his findings at the 2025 ION GNSS+ conference.

Many continuously-operating GNSS reference stations, scattered across the hemisphere, have been reporting simultaneous bursts of interference. Primarily striking the Baltic states, Finland, and Norway — with Svalbard, Spain, Canada, and Greenland marginally affected — the interference cannot be coming from the surface.

The interference is likely triggered by human activity. But “if this is deliberate, it’s a strange kind of deliberate.” Dr. Humphreys stated that, “what we see is fairly constant in the kinds of temporal patterns and spatial patterns,” with an estimated signal power reaching as high as 2kW from a satellite in GEO. It is possible that this interference source is coming from routine satellite maintenance, unbeknownst to the satellite operator.

“By putting the pattern together, the timing, and… the spatial distribution, we’re able to reduce the number of candidate satellites just to those you could count on one hand,” said Dr. Humphreys. These findings develop new tools to identify sources of jamming, defending against the future of electronic warfare.

Listen in with the BBC’s Roland Pease here.

September 2025: GNSS spoofing has been growing more prevalent in European airspace. A report for the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) prepared by representatives of Switzerland, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland, shows that almost 123,000 flights have been affected by radio interference. Much of this interference is concentrated in Russian airspace and has been historically attributed to Russian sources.

“Of course, a large part of Russian [spoofing and jamming] activity is directly tied to its war with Ukraine,” the RNL’s Dr. Todd Humphreys stated. But this interference, “originating far from the front lines — for instance, from Kaliningrad or regions along the Estonian border — is more likely [of offensive origin], rather than a defensive one.” After all, “some of the [interference] techniques used… seem to be specially designed to disrupt Western aviation. This has nothing to do with protecting Russia.”

For the full article, read more here.

September 2025: In late August, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, had her plane knocked off course due to GNSS interference. Since the escalation of the Russian-Ukranian conflict in 2022, radio interference has begun to affect much of continental Europe.

The RNL’s Dr. Todd Humphreys said, “if the pilots [on von der Leyen’s flight] redirected due to jamming, it’s a near certainty that both of the GPS receivers used in the flight management system were jammed. Pilots don’t divert for no reason.” Dr. Humphreys adds that, “despite years of research, no one has found a replacement for GPS that is cheap, globally accessible, and also provides accurate timing, yet not vulnerable to jamming and spoofing like GPS/GNSS is.”

“Precision guidance munitions are severely affected,” continued Dr. Humphreys. “Smart bombs are rendered dumb by GPS spoofing and jamming, [and] small drones face spoofing and jamming routinely.” Many US-supplied weapons rely on GPS, such as the Himars missiles and Excalibur GPS-guided artillery shells, and have largely been rendered inoperable due to GNSS jamming.

For more, read the full article here.

August 2025: With rising concerns on the vulnerability of GNSS, the FCC seeks to explore solutions to improve the robustness of PNT services. SpaceX argues that the Starlink system may support the FCC’s interest in a ‘layered’ approach to national PNT resilience by providing secure, reliable, and global coverage.

“It looks like SpaceX has come around to viewing PNT as ‘today’s problem’,” says the RNL’s Dr. Humphreys, “But what’s interesting about their recent comment is an emphasis on… D2C signals for PNT rather than the Ku-band broadband signals.” He says that at present, “Starlink’s timing in the Ku band is so irregular that accurate pseudorange-based PNT is not possible,” as can be seen in a recent paper from the RNL.

For more, and a look into Starlink’s potential future in PNT, read the Inside GNSS story here.