News

The Aviation Week Network recently announced the winners of this year’s 20 Twenties Award. WNCG student Hailey Nichols was among the students chosen for the class of 2022.

WNCG student Hailey Nichols won first place in the Graduate/Postdoc category at last month’s Female Founder Pitch competition. The event was hosted by the Kendra Scott Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership Institute and the Texas Innovation Center.

WNCG student Lakshay Narula received the Walter R. Fried Memorial Award for Best Paper at the 2020 IEEE/ION PLANSx Conference. The award recognizes “substantial contribution to the technology of navigation and positioning equipment, systems, or practices” judged on criteria including technical content, innovation, importance of topic, and writing quality. Narula’s winning paper, “Automotive-Radar-Based 50-cm Urban Positioning,” demonstrated how self-driving cars can use commercially-available, low-cost automotive radars to improve navigation.

WNCG Prof. Todd Humphreys and his group of researchers in the Radionavigation Laboratory made headlines in recent months with their major breakthroughs in centimeter-accurate positioning. A few of the students have already created a startup spin-off to push these breakthroughs in precise positioning to the mass market.

Imagine drawing a light painting using a phone’s antenna and GPS system. Imagine a world of virtual reality, where buildings are perfect replicas of their real-world counterparts, down to the exact height of a piece of gum stuck under a desk. Where a person cannot only see their location on the street but also the exact height and orientation of their mobile device in hand. This world of imagination and precise positioning is now becoming a reality, and through the efforts of WNCG students, even finding its way to market. 

Img: Two of the Cockrell School graduate students behind Radiosense, Ken Pesyna and Andrew Kerns. Cockrell School of Engineering, UT Austin Researchers in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin have developed a centimeter-accurate GPS-based positioning system that could revolutionize geolocation on virtual reality headsets, cellphones and other technologies, making global positioning and orientation far more precise than what is currently available on a mobile device.

Manassas Virginia, January 28, 2015 - The Institute of Navigation (ION) presented its Thomas L. Thurlow Award to Dr. Todd Humphreys at the ION International Technical Meeting (ITM)in Dana Point, California, January 26-28, 2015. Dr. Humphreys was recognized for contributions that enhance radionavigation security and robustness in the face of intentional spoofing and natural interference.