Spotlight

A recent article on Wired featured comments from Dr. Humphreys’s Congressional testimony on the threat of rogue UAVs.

“With only minor changes to [a] UAV’s autopilot software, of which highly capable open-source variants exist, an attacker could readily disable geofencing and could configure the UAV to operate under ‘radio silence,’ ignoring external radio control commands and emitting no radio signals of its own” … “Imposing restrictions on small UAVs beyond the sensible restrictions the Federal Aviation Administration recently proposed would not significantly reduce the threat of rogue UAVs yet would shackle the emerging commercial UAV industry”.

Read the article on wired.com.

The UT Radionavigation Lab featured on NBC Nightly News with Kristen Welker on October 31, 2015. The segment focused on anti-UAV techniques developed by Dr. Humphreys and his students, which have come into the spotlight following the inadvertent landing of a drone at the White House.

The news segment can be viewed at the NBS News website.

Austin, TX—Dr. Todd Humphreys delivered a keynote presentation at the 2015 Texas GIS Forum, where he talked about rendering of geo-referenced decimeter accurate maps using Low-Cost Mobile Positioning on a smartphone along with the smartphone’s camera.

This presentation focused on techniques for performing carrier-phase differential positioning using a low-quality antenna, and generation of an accurate 3-dimensional point cloud using a smartphone. The points in the generated map are geo-referenced which enables distributed generation of maps, unlike the standard computer vision techniques where a continuous sequence of overlapping images is required.

The presentation can be downloaded from here.

Minneapolis, MN—Dr. Todd Humphreys delivered a seminar at the Roadway Safety Insititute at University of Minnesota, where he talked about Low-Cost Centimeter-Accurate Mobile Positioning with attention to application in Vehicular Networks. GNSS, along with other sensors, will be a part of the Connected (Semi-) Autonomous Vehicles of the future, and accurate location and timing via GNSS is an important aspect of roadway safety.

The primary barrier to performing centimeter-accurate carrier-phase-differential GNSS (CDGNSS) positioning on smartphones and other consumer devices is their low-cost, low-quality GNSS antennas that have poor multipath suppression. The time correlation of multipath errors and their magnitude significantly increases the initialization period of GNSS receivers using low-cost antennas.

This presentation focused on techniques for reducing the initialization time for centimeter-accurate positioning on mobile devices. It further examined technical and market prerequisites for improved safety for semi-autonomous and autonomous vehicles, globally registered augmented and virtual reality, and crowd-sourced three-dimensional mapping.

Watch the full length presentation at Roadway Safety Institute webpage.

Tampa, FL—Nathan Green won the best paper presentation award in the Advanced Technologies in High Precision GNSS Positioning Session of the ION GNSS+ 2015 conference for his paper entitled “Fault Free Integrity of Mid-Level Voting for Triplex Differential GPS Solutions.”

Details about the session proceedings: Session E1: Advanced Technologies in High Precision GNSS Positioning 1.

“Amazon badly wants to deliver packages of DVDs and Cheez-Its to your doorstep in a matter of minutes—and it wants to use drones to do so. At a NASA convention in July, Amazon Prime Air’s vice president proposed the company’s vision for how unmanned aircraft could one day safely navigate our skies. And NASA recently began testing its first version of an air traffic management system for drones—the agency is partnering with companies including Amazon and Verizon to develop the system.”

“For now, regulations and technical issues make widespread drone deliveries impossible, which means an army of flying machines probably will not fetch your holiday gifts this year or even the next. Here’s what experts note as the major challenges to resolve before delivery by drone becomes a reality.”

Continue reading the article at Scientific American, which features comments by Dr. Humphreys.

Apple confirmed on May 16, 2015 that they have acquired the startup Coherent Navigation, which Dr. Humphreys co-founded in 2008 together with Clark Cohen (CEO at founding), Bill Bencze (VP of Engineering), Brent Ledvina (VP of Business Development), Mark Psiaki, and Mike Eglington. Dr. Humphreys left Coherent Navigation in 2009 to join the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin, but continued to collaborate as a private consultant and sub-contractor until the acquisition. Congratulations to the Coherent Navigation team for their hard work over the years — especially to Brent Ledvina and Bill Bencze, the two co-founders who shepherded the venture all the way through acquisition. Congratulations also to other key players: Paul Lego (CEO of Coherent Navigation at the time of acquisition), Isaac Miller (CTO of Coherent Navigation), and Rob Brumley (COO of Coherent Navigation). Never in recent memory has there been assembled such a concentration of position, navigation, and timing expertise in a single startup as in Coherent Navigation.

The acquisition was covered by MacRumors, the New York Times, and other news agencies.