Magazine Cover Features Kassas’ Navigation Research

Kassas and his graduate students researched a novel navigation framework for autonomous vehicles that utilizes low-Earth orbit satellite signals

Sept. 25, 2019 - The cover of the August 2019  Inside GNSS, a magazine for the global navigation satellite system community, featured research by Zak Kassas, Samueli School assistant professor of mechanical & aerospace engineering and electrical engineering & computer science, and his EECS doctoral students Joshua Morales and Joe Khalife. The article, titled New-Age Satellite-Based Navigation – STAN: Simultaneous Tracking and Navigation with LEO Satellite Signals, discusses the potential of exploiting existing and future low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations for navigation. It presents a novel navigation framework for autonomous vehicles via a tightly-coupled LEO-aided inertial navigation system. This simultaneous tracking and navigation framework estimates the states – position, velocity, clock errors and other parameters – of LEO satellites simultaneously with the states of the navigating vehicle. The article presents simulation and experimental results for ground vehicles and unmanned aerial vehicles navigating with LEO signals, with simulation results showing the potential of LEO constellations to achieve GPS-like navigation performance. The team’s results represent the most accurate results to date for opportunistic navigation with LEO satellites.    

- Anna Lynn Spitzer                                                        

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