WNCG professor Todd Humphreys and postdoctoral fellow Peter Iannucci of the Radionavigation Laboratory have developed a system using the constellation of SpaceX satellites to potentially deliver a low-cost, more accurate, and highly secure alternative to GPS.
Their work was recently featured in the MIT Technology Review:
WNCG professor Todd Humphreys has received the Institute of Navigation’s (ION) “highest honor.” Humphreys was elected to the membership rank of Fellow at ION’s International Technical Meeting in January. He is one of only three recipients of the honor for 2020.
Humphreys’ election cited his “significant and fundamental contributions to PNT security and precise GNSS positioning for the mass market, and for dedication to GNSS education and outreach.”
The next few decades will see pervasive autonomous control systems become critical to the world economy---from autonomous cars and aircraft to smart homes, smart cities, and vast energy, communication, and financial networks controlled at multiple scales. Protecting these systems from malicious attacks is a matter of urgent societal interest. The study of secure control has made important advances over the past few years, but these constitute not solutions so much as problem framing and an emerging consensus that traditional fault detection and mitigation fails when confronted with a deliberate attacker: outlaws are different from outliers; fraud is different from faults. Moreover, the vast majority of this early literature focuses only on cyber attacks---infiltration of the communications networks over which sensor measurements y and control commands u are conveyed.
