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 devices,” Humphreys said. “Someone somewhere is selling cheap turnkey GPS spoofers.”
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 hardware has become available. In an article from New Scientist, Dr. Todd Humphreys explains:
“Over a decade ago, Chinese companies began to offer cheap jammers, which became known as ‘personal privacy devices’. I think what we’re witnessing here is the emergence of commoditized spoofing: someone has begun selling a low-cost spoofing device for use on ships.”
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:
Together, these papers represent a significant step toward realizing safe and affordable self-driving cars.
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!
Read more about the paper and award on the university website.
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 a shared dataset, and this dataset must be challenging and representative of typical urban driving. Self-driving car datasets available today do not provide raw IF GNSS data, or even the raw pseudorange and carrier-phase observables. With the release of TEX-CUP, we’re hopeful that the precise positioning community will finally have a shared benchmark dataset. As we add data from many major cities around the world, we believe TEX-CUP will be the go-to dataset for precise GNSS evaluation.”
We look forward to seeing what the community achieves with Lakshay’s dataset!
April 2020: This article from GPS World reports on GPS spoofing discovered in Iran. It references some of Dr. Humphreys’s early work in GPS spoofing.
March 2020: Admiration for GPS runs high among RNL alumni, as witnessed by K. Wesson’s new license plate!
February 2020: The Radionavigation Lab’s work in GNSS interference detection was featured on the cover of Inside GNSS, a magazine dedicated to global navigation systems. Click here to read the article from Inside GNSS.
In 2017, the Radionavigation lab placed a custom software defined receiver onboard the International Space Station as part of a larger effort to study GNSS signals in the low Earth orbit environment. Over the two year study, multiple sources of GNSS interference were identified by analyzing data from the receiver. This work was done by Radionavigation Lab members Matthew Murrian (lead author), Lakshay Narula, and Todd Humphreys. Brady O’Hanlon from MITRE Corporation and Scott Budzien from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory were also collaborators on the project. Congratulations to the authors!
February 2020: The Institute of Navigation presented awards at their International Technical Meeting in January. These recipients are affiliated with the Radionavigation Laboratory:
February 2020: The Army Futures Command (AFC) has partnered with the University of Texas at Austin to develop robots to assist with dangerous tasks on the battlefield. These robots will assist with non-combat jobs such as minesweeping and obstacle removal. This partnership has enabled the construction of a new robotics center at UT Austin.
“It’s a real endorsement for the Cockrell School and for UT in general,” says Dr. Humphreys, “There are really compelling problems here — at the edge of what we can currently do. For students interested in pushing the frontiers of science and research, it’s inspiring, it will have consequences, and the U.S. desperately needs it.”
Both the AFC and UT Austin are looking forward to a lasting partnership that will save lives on the battlefield while enriching students’ educational experience. Read the full article from Texas Engineer for a glimpse of some of the upcoming research.
