Spotlight

October 2020: This recent article from BBC explores the modern world’s dependence on GPS and some possible position, navigation, and timing alternatives. We depend on GPS for everything from turn-by-turn navigation to banking transactions, but the system has some critical vulnerabilities to jamming and spoofing.

“There is a growing recognition of the need to protect, toughen, and augment GPS,” Humphreys said, “There is also the remote threat that the whole GPS constellation could be rendered inoperable in the initial salvo of a war targeting the US economy by attacking critical infrastructure.”

Many research groups are developing possible alternatives like terrestrial, inertial, and even celestial navigation, but none of these have been able to fully replace GPS. 

October 2020: Dr. Peter Iannucci’s recently-submitted paper, Fused Low-Earth-Orbit GNSS, was highlighted in the MIT technology review for its expected impact on the US Army’s navigation technologies. The paper proposes to leverage low-earth-orbit internet constellations, like SpaceX’s Starlink, to provide strong, jam-resistant positioning signals that augment the existing GPS. The need for this augmentation is emphasized by the recent emergence of low-cost GNSS jammers and spoofers, which have been appearing across the globe. Dr. Iannucci and his coauthor Dr. Humphreys are optimistic that this technology will prove indispensable for high-integrity navigation. 

Read the MIT Technology Review article here.

September 2020: The Department of Transportation recently allocated nearly 2 million dollars to fund a new University Transportation Center (UTC) whose members include Ohio State University, the University of California Irvine, and the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Zak Kassas, an RNL alumnus, is the Principal Investigator of the overall multi-university center. Dr. Humphreys will lead the center’s effort at UT Austin. “We beat out at least a dozen other teams vying for this UTC,” Humphreys explains. The UTC will focus research on highly-automated transportation systems, with an emphasis on safety, security, and reliability. Read the full article here.

September 2020: NASA recently started accepting commercial contracts for missions to the International Space Station (ISS). Initially intended to make the ISS more accessible to scientific companies, the new initiative is attracting unexpected clients. NASA astronauts will soon be tasked with filming cosmetics commercials and transporting souvenirs. Dr. Todd Humphreys comments on this development, saying “If the circus is necessary to maintain the International Space Station, it’s probably a good trade-off.” 

Read the New Scientist article here.

August 2020: Dr. Todd Humphreys’s groundbreaking work in GPS over the past decade was featured in this article from the New Yorker. The article offers a charming summary of Dr. Humphreys’s career and the Radionavigation Lab’s GPS-related research.

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.”

Read the full story in this Newsweek article.

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.”

Read the New Scientist article here.

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:

• Deep Urban Unaided Precise GNSS Vehicle Positioning
• Automotive-Radar-Based 50-cm Urban Positioning

Together, these papers represent a significant step toward realizing safe and affordable self-driving cars.

Watch Dr. Humphreys’s presentation here!

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!