Spotlight

Austin, TX—Ken Pesyna gave a GPS World webinar on GNSS antennas. You can view the webinar recording, or the related paper and magazine article.

“No system or software designer, innovator, or inventor has a perfect record. As with baseball sluggers, a 33 percent success rate with significant projects—delivered on time without errors—probably qualifies you as a superstar. So the act of coming up with a bad idea, or a failed implementation thereof, doesn’t disqualify you from getting kudos.  But there are consumer-level bad ideas and industrial strength bad ideas. The latter are the more worrisome, especially if they recur with any frequency. As such, I’ll deal with them here.

Continue reading the IEEE Computer article, which discusses Dr. Humphrey’s research.

Austin, TX — Ken Pesyna, Robert Heath, and Todd Humphreys authored the cover story of GPS World on centimeter-accurate positioning using smartphone GNSS antennas in the February 2015 edition.

“The smartphone antenna’s poor multipath suppression and irregular gain pattern result in large time-correlated phase errors that significantly increase the time to integer ambiguity resolution as compared to even a low-quality stand-alone patch antenna. The time to integer resolution — and to a centimeter-accurate fix — is significantly reduced when more GNSS signals are tracked or when the smartphone experiences gentle wavelength-scale random motion.

Continue reading the GPS World article, or download a PDF copy.

“The Institute of Navigation (ION) has selected Todd Humphreys, assistant professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at the Cockrell School of Engineering, to receive the Colonel Thomas L. Thurlow Award. Humphreys was selected ‘for contributions that enhance radionavigation security and robustness in the face of intentional spoofing and natural interference.’ ION presented Humphreys with the award at the ION Technical Meeting (ITM) in Dana Point, California, January 26-28.

Continue reading the announcement from the UT Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics department.

“The Secret Service said it believes a hobbyist accidentally crashed a drone onto the White House grounds early Monday, an incident that prompted a lockdown and delivered a wake-up call over the potential terrorism threat of unmanned aircraft.

“The person flying the 2-foot helicopter that crashed called the Secret Service after the incident was widely reported and has been cooperating with agents, the agency said. Authorities didn’t identify the person.

“The Secret Service said the crash appears to have ‘occurred as a result of recreational use of the device,’ but officials said the agency is still following up on other leads.

Continue reading the WSJ article, and a follow-up WSJ article entitled “Criminals, Terrorists Find Uses for Drones, Raising Concerns,” both of which feature interviews with Dr. Humphreys.

“The man considered to be one of the biggest influences in the transportation world is in Austin this week. Tesla co-founder and CEO Elon Musk addressed a crowd Thursday at the 10th Annual Texas Transportation Forum. Musk, who has overseen product development and design for all of Tesla’s electric cars, also is the creative spark behind the development of rockets and spacecraft for SpaceX. Musk’s work embodies the idea of transformation, which is the theme of this year’s Texas Transportation Forum.

Continue reading the article, which features an interview with Dr. Humphreys, at KXAN.

“In the summer of 2012, a small robotic helicopter, painted Texas Longhorns orange and white, climbed into the air above the team’s empty football field in Austin. Then the device suddenly plummeted toward the grass, its controller overridden by a team of university- sanctioned hackers. A few days later, in the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, the same group (with permission) easily hijacked the university’s $80,000 military-grade drone.

“No one had ever done the attack that we did before,” says Todd Humphreys, director of the Radionavigation Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin. At least not in the declassified world. But that doesn’t mean it’s not easy to replicate. Humphreys’s team used a relatively simple hand-built radio device to exploit a major loophole in drone security: the devices’ reliance on unauthenticated position data beamed from GPS satellites.”

Continue reading the article at Popular Science. 

Dr. Humphreys lectured on “Drones: Myths, Facts, Hacks, and The Future” on Friday, November 21, 2014 as the 93rd installment of the Hot Science Cool Talks outreach series hosted by UT’s Environmental Science Institute.

To view the recorded lecture visit the ESI website and click the “View Webcast” button.

“The drone revolution isn’t coming—it’s already here. Can UT expertise help us navigate the future?

“The stadium was buzzing. It was a balmy day in late August and more than 93,000 fans were finally getting to see the topic of endless hype for themselves. Thousands of articles had been written, teeth had been gnashed, hands were wrung, and no one—not even the experts—knew what would happen. They weren’t watching the game. They were watching a tiny white helicopter with four rotors and an array of flashing lights cruising high above the Longhorns’ season opener.”

Continue reading the Alcalde article, which features an interview with Dr. Humphreys.

A collaboration between the UT Radionavigation Lab, Cornell, and the White Rose of Drachs, is reported in the GPS World magazine.  

“A new method detects spoofing attacks that are resistant to standard RAIM technique and can sense an attack in a fraction of a second without external aiding. The signal-in-space properties used to detect spoofing are the relationships of the signal arrival directions to the vector that points from one antenna to the other. A real-time implementation succeeded against live-signal spoofing attacks aboard a superyacht, the White Rose of Drachs…, cruising in international waters.”

Continue reading the article at GPS World.