Australians make a big splash at ION-GNSS 2011
The 24th International Technical Meting of the Satellite Division of the US Institute of Navigation (ION-GNSS) was held 20-23 September 2011, in Portland, Oregon. ION-GNSS is the world’s premier Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) conference – an annual event that attracts well over 1500 participants, approximately 40% of whom come from overseas. This year Australians made quite an impact, or in sporting parlance ‘punched above their weight’.
The Canberra-based Locata Corporation had a large exhibition booth and ran live demos of the Locata positioning system working indoors, with centimetre-level accuracy. These demonstrations were very popular, with many public and private briefings and demos being given in a ballroom of the Oregon Convention Center, from morning to night, from Monday 19 to Friday 23 September. Nunzio Gambale (CEO of Locata Corporation), Dave Small and his team worked very hard. Having come out of ‘stealth’ mode, they were keen to show everyone the fantastic performance of their system. With so many interested organisations we can expect to hear partnership announcements in the coming months.
The Locata Interface Control Document (ICD), with full signal specifications, was also released at ION-GNSS. Now any company can build its own Locata receiver. However the Locata Corporation would hold the rights to build the LocataLite transmitter components of the positioning infrastructure. Nunzio held a news conference at noon on Wednesday 21 September, and announced a partnership with Leica Geosystems for the development of a range of integrated GNSS+Locata receiver devices. These would target open-cut mining (eg machine guidance systems) and indoor (eg for warehousing) applications. Up to six papers dealing with Locata technology and applications were presented at the ION-GNSS technical sessions. It was most pleasing to see the positive reactions of international companies, government agencies and research institutions, and clearly Australia was making a strong statement that it could develop innovative position, navigation and timing (PNT) technologies.
But Australians also showed that they were excellent academic researchers. Dr Allison Kealy (University of Melbourne) was one of the six Track Chairs, and is also currently the Asia-Pacific representative on the US ION’s Satellite Division Executive. Professor Andrew Dempster (University of New South Wales -UNSW) was a Session Co-Chair. In attendance at ION-GNSS there was one other Australian academic, Dr Sue Lynn Choi (RMIT University), a postgraduate student from the University of Melbourne (Peter Ramm), as well as one or two Australian government officers. However, UNSW had the strongest contingent: four staff and two postgraduate students of the School of Surveying and Spatial Information Systems (SSIS), who between them made 10 oral presentations and/or submitted papers for inclusion in the ION-GNSS proceedings.
Professor Chris Rizos was one of the three plenary speakers at the opening of the ION-GNSS conference, making a presentation ‘Ubiquitous Positioning: are we there yet?’. Chris also made three other presentations at technical sessions during the week. Professor Andrew Dempster and Associate Professor Jinling Wang each made an oral presentation.
Dr Nagaraj Shivaramaiah won the prestigious US ION Parkinson Award for best submitted postgraduate research thesis in 2011, on the topic of satellite navigation, in a global competition. His thesis was entitled ‘Enhanced Receiver Techniques for Galileo E5 AltBOC Signal Processing’. He also made a presentation ‘Cognitive GNSS Receiver Design: Concepts and Challenges’ in one of the technical sessions.
Two UNSW-SSIS postgraduate students were selected winners of student prizes (out of a total of eight awarded internationally), funded to travel to ION-GNSS and to present their winning papers. Nima Alam’s paper was entitled ‘Three Dimensional Positioning With Two GNSS Satellites and DSRC for Vehicles in Urban Canyons’, and Joon Wayn Cheong’s was ‘Towards Multi-Constellation Collection Detection of Weak Signals: A Comparative Experimental Analysis’. Nima and Joon Wayn were the 29th and 30th US ION student prizewinners from UNSW SSIS since 1988, when Chris’s first postgraduate student Bertrand Merminod (now professor at EPFL, Switzerland) won the first of these coveted prizes. This is an outstanding record of academic achievement, bettered by only one other university department in the world: the Department of Geomatics Engineering, University of Calgary (Canada).
Yes, Australians made quite a splash at ION-GNSS. In particular Locata Corporation has made a dramatic impact with its innovative PNT technology. UNSW SSIS demonstrated once again that it is Australia’s premier academic group focused on GNSS and wireless positioning research.
Professor Chris Rizos
School of Surveying& Spatial Information Systems
The University of New South Wales
Pictured left to right: Dorota Brzezinska (OSU), Joon Wayn Cheong (UNSW SSIS), Nima Alam (UNSW SSIS), Charles Toth (OSU), Chris Rizos (UNSW SSIS), Nagaraj Shivaramaiah (UNSW SSIS), Andrew Dempster (UNSW SSIS), Joel Barnes (Locata Corp), Jinling Wang (UNSW SSIS), Anthony Cole (Leica), Steve Hewitson (Locata Corp) and Allison Kealy (University of Melbourne).