GPS World

Tag: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

  • GAO discusses DOD PNT management and leadership — again

    GAO discusses DOD PNT management and leadership — again

    In early August, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released its third report in 15 months about GPS and other positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) issues within the Department of Defense (DOD). Each report raised raised concerns about the way in which PNT programs were being managed and led within the department.

    Defense Navigation Capabilities

    In May 2021, GAO reported on “Defense Navigation Capabilities: DOD is Developing Positioning, Navigation, and Timing Technologies to Complement GPS.”

    Observations included that DOD continues to rely heavily on GPS despite known vulnerabilities. Also, that alternate PNT efforts are not well coordinated and receive little support.

    “Opportunities” for DOD to improve its alternate PNT efforts, according to the report, include:

    • Improving coordination across the services
    • Clarifying authorities and responsibilities for prioritizing needs
    • Focusing on resiliency versus GPS as the cornerstone of department PNT efforts
    • Clarifying PNT requirements rather than just defaulting to GPS as “the need”
    • Coordinating with industry.

    GPS Modernization

    In May, GAO issued the report “GPS Modernization: Better Information and Detailed Test Plans Needed for Timely Fielding of Military User Equipment.” about the implementation of M-code — the military-only, stronger, more jam-resistant signal.

    The report pointed out that M-code has been in development for 20+ years, and that GPS satellites have been capable of transmitting M-code signals since 2005. Also, while there are still program risks, the Next Generation Ground Control Segment, known as OCX, is forecast to be ready to support M-code use by 2023.

    OCX has experienced severe cost overruns and is more than five years behind its original schedule. GAO issued a report on OCX delays in May 2019.

    M-code won’t really be a capability in DOD, though, until user equipment is widely fielded. That will take several more years, according to GAO.

    One of the remaining challenges to M-code implementation, GAO said, was that the department did not collect and validate all the data it needed for leadership planning and prioritization.

    GPS Alternatives

    The first week of August saw release of the GAO report “GPS Alternatives: DOD Is Developing Navigation Systems But Is Not Measuring Overall Progress.”

    A summary on the first page of the report contains what could be seen as harsh criticism of how PNT efforts are led within DOD:

    “DOD’s overall PNT portfolio is managed by the PNT Oversight Council, a statutorily established senior-level body. However, the Council has largely prioritized modernizing the existing GPS system over alternative PNT efforts during recent meetings and has no strategic objectives or metrics to measure progress on the alternative efforts.”

    Image: DOD
    Image: DOD

    Too Much Leadership?

    Some believe the real problem with DOD PNT is not a lack of leadership, but rather too much.

    “If everyone is in charge, no one is,” commented one retired senior military officer familiar with the issue.

    “Congress has been concerned about DOD’s lack of attention to GPS and PNT alternatives for years,” the individual said. “In 2015 Congress mandated creation of the Oversight Council to help ensure PNT got the right amount of leadership attention.” This may have not had the desired effect, though.

    “The council is comprised of three undersecretaries, the vice chairman [of the Joint Chiefs of Staff], four combatant commanders, the NSA [National Security Agency] director, DOD’s CIO [chief information officer], and host of other very senior folks. All of whom have way too many other duties. It’s no wonder the department has a hard time getting things done!”

    The department’s CIO is the Defense Secretary’s Principal Staff Assistant for PNT. As such, the CIO is tasked with coordinating department-wide efforts. The task is made particularly difficult by the many and diverse players across the department, all of whom have their own authorities, interests and projects.

    Proposed systems and capabilities are examined and developed by a variety of DOD organizations. These include laboratories belonging to the five services and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

    Programs of Record, which usually lead to acquisition of large systems, are led and managed within the individual services.

    A Better Way?

    Aside from recommending improved coordination of PNT efforts across the department, GAO has never addressed the way DOD manages its PNT enterprise.

    “That is not something we normally get into unless specifically tasked,” said one of the reports’ authors. “We assume departments know best how to lead and manage their efforts.”

    Others are not so reticent. They believe the current management structure is incapable of managing the development, acquisition and fielding of the DOD PNT Enterprise with any urgency or efficiency.

    “GAO’s focus on the Oversight Council is misplaced,” one retired official asserted. “The missing piece is not oversight, it’s day-to-day DOD-wide management.”

    “They need a multi-service program of record for resilient PNT,” the official said. “This would be separate from the GPS program, which would keep its own projects going and feed into the resilient effort. The new resilient PNT program should be managed by a Joint Program Office, which could consolidate integration and acquisition of resilient PNT applications. The office would be the steward for the critical technologies that underpin the modular, open-system integration strategy, including the digital reference architecture, input and output standards, software fusion engines, and needed modeling and simulation tools to ensure NAVWAR compliance.”

    Such a construct could provide needed focus and coordination to DOD efforts, address many long-standing congressional concerns, and, by coordinating efforts within DOD and with industry, accelerate progress.

    Related article: Who Runs GPS? 

    Dana A. Goward is President of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation. He serves on the President’s National Space-based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing Advisory Board.

  • Draper equips UAVs with vision for GPS-denied navigation

    Draper equips UAVs with vision for GPS-denied navigation

    A team from Draper and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has developed advanced vision-aided navigation techniques for UAVs that do not rely on external infrastructure, such as GPS, detailed maps of the environment or motion capture systems.

    When a firefighter, first responder or soldier operates a small, lightweight flight vehicle inside a building, in urban canyons, underground or under the forest canopy, the GPS-denied environment presents unique navigation challenges.

    In many cases, loss of GPS signals can cause these vehicles to become inoperable and, in the worst case, unstable, potentially putting operators, bystanders and property in danger.

    Attempts have been made to close this information gap and give UAVs alternative ways to navigate their environments without GPS. But those attempts have resulted in further information gaps, especially on UAVs whose speeds can outpace the capabilities of their onboard technologies.

    For instance, scanning lidar routinely fails to achieve its location-matching with accuracy when the UAV is flying through environments that lack buildings, trees and other orienting structures.

    Finding a Solution

    DARPA awarded contracts to Draper and two other industry teams to create UAVs that autonomously sense and maneuver through unknown environments without external communications or GPS under the Fast Lightweight Autonomy (FLA) program. (Photo: Draper)

    Working together under a contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Draper and MIT created a UAV that can autonomously sense and maneuver through unknown environments without external communications or GPS under the Fast Lightweight Autonomy (FLA) program.

    The team developed and implemented unique sensor and algorithm configurations, and has conducted time-trials and performance evaluations in indoor and outdoor venues.

    “The biggest challenge with unmanned aerial vehicles is balancing power, flight time and capability due to the weight of the technology required to power the UAVs,” said Robert Truax, senior member of technical staff at Draper. “What makes the Draper and MIT team’s approach so valuable is finding the sweet spot of a small size, weight and power for an air vehicle with limited onboard computing power to perform a complex mission completely autonomously.”

    Draper and MIT’s sensor- and camera-loaded UAV was tested in a number of environments ranging between cluttered warehouses and mixed open and tree filled outdoor environments with speeds up to 10 m/s in cluttered areas and 20 m/s in open areas.

    The UAV’s missions were composed of many challenging elements, including tree dodging followed by building entry and exit and long traverses to find a building entry point, all while maintaining precise position estimates.

    “A faster, more agile and autonomous UAV means that you’re able to quickly navigate a labyrinth of rooms, stairways and corridors or other obstacle-filled environments without a remote pilot,” said Ted Steiner, senior member of Draper’s technical staff. “Our sensing and algorithm configurations and unique monocular camera with IMU-centric navigation gives the vehicle agile maneuvering and improved reliability and safety — the capabilities most in demand by first responders, commercial users, military personnel and anyone designing and building UAVs.”

    Draper’s contribution to the DARPA FLA program — documented in a recent research paper for the 2017 IEE Aerospace Conference — was a novel approach to state estimation (the vehicle’s position, orientation and velocity) called SAMWISE — Smoothing And Mapping With Inertial State Estimation.

    SAMWISE is a fused vision and inertial navigation system that combines the advantages of both sensing approaches and accumulates error more slowly over time than either technique on its own, producing a full position, attitude and velocity state estimate throughout the vehicle trajectory.

    The result is a navigation solution that enables a UAV to retain all six degrees of freedom and allows it to fly autonomously without the use of GPS or any communication with vehicle speeds of up to 45 miles per hour.

    The team’s focus on the FLA program has been on UAVs, but advances made through the program could potentially be applied to ground, marine and underwater systems, which could be especially useful in GPS-degraded or denied environments.

    In developing the UAV, the team leveraged Draper and MIT’s expertise in autonomous path planning, machine vision, GPS-denied navigation and dynamic flight controls.

  • PNT Roundup: Navigating GPS-free, MEMS inertial trends and non-GPS tracking

    Navigating GPS-free and MEMS inertial trends

     
    Keynotes at February’s Inertial Sensors conference summarize initiatives to provide continuous, high-frequency and high-accuracy position spanning GPS outages or obstructions.

    GPS-Free. Robert Lutwak, program manager at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), spoke on “Precise Robust Inertial Guidance for Munitions: Navigating in a GPS-free World.”

    Over the past decade, the DARPA Micro-Technology for Position, Navigation, and Timing (micro-PNT) program developed low-CSWaP inertial sensors as a backup or “flywheel” PNT solution for GNSS augmentation, validation and holdover in obfuscated environments. New programs, such as the Precise Robust Inertial Guidance for Munitions (PRIGM) program, seek to ruggedize and deploy devices developed under micro-PNT and to extend the performance to support longer and more dynamic mission scenarios. In addition to maturing micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) and atomic technologies developed under micro-PNT, PRIGM is exploring new sensing modalities and architectures, including those enabled by integrated photonics and by the tight integration of photonic and MEMS technologies.

    Accuracy One-Thousandfold. Lutwak also gave an overview of DARPA’s new Atomic Clocks with Enhanced Stability (ACES) program. A technology challenge budgeted for up to $50 million, ACES’ goal is to design and build a new generation of palm-sized, battery-powered atomic clocks that perform up to 1,000 times better than the current generation — DARPA’s Chip-Scale Atomic Clock.

    The new clocks must fit into a package about the size of a billfold and run on a mere quarter-watt of power. Success will require advances that counter accuracy-eroding processes in current atomic clocks, among them variations in atomic frequencies that result from temperature fluctuations and subtle frequency differences that can occur if the power shuts down and then starts up again.

    “It will take a collaboration of teams with skill sets from diverse fields, including atomic physics, optics, photonics, microfabrication and vacuum technology, to achieve the unprecedented clock stability that we seek,” Lutwak said.

    MEMS Transition. Stephen Breit, director of engineering for Coventor, gave his predictions for the “Future of the Commodity MEMS Inertial Sensor Design and Manufacturing.”

    Emerging trends that could lead to disruptive changes include commoditization of MEMS process technology, consolidation of advanced semiconductor technology, More-than-Moore integration, and the Internet of Things (IoT). These trends motivate industry efforts toward a transition similar to the one that occurred in the CMOS industry: from integrated device manufacturers to a fabless/foundry business model.

    This will require a design automation flow that provides a platform for process design kits (PDKs) that foundries can supply to their fabless customers.

    Exploiting fingerprints, other smartphone features

     
    Tiny irregularities in an Android or iPhone’s accelerometer can be turned into a unique signature to track users, Stanford researchers found in 2013. These flaws essentially fingerprint an individual smartphone and allow it to be traced. Highly focused activity since then, some of it summarized here, has advanced the frontiers of non-GPS tracking. Developments could prove interesting to privacy advocates, online marketers and law enforcement.

    Security researcher Hristo Bojinov demonstrated how, in a matter of seconds, he induced his smartphone to give up its “fingerprints.” Code running on a website in the device’s mobile browser measured the tiniest defects in the device’s accelerometer, producing a unique set of numbers — exploitable to identify and track most smartphones. Marketers could use the ID the same way they use cookies to identify a particular user, monitor their online actions and target ads.

    The research team was also able to identify phones using their microphones and speakers. They found they could produce a unique frequency response curve, based on how devices play and record a common set of frequencies.

    Amplifiers and Oscillators. A team at the Technical University of Dresden developed a tracking method that exploits variations in the radio signal of cell phones. The collection of components such as power amplifiers, oscillators and signal mixers can all introduce radio-signal inaccuracies.
    Bojinov and colleagues presented further work at the RSA Conference 2015, in “Sensor ID: Mobile Device Identification via Sensor Fingerprinting.” Among findings:

    • We have found ways to construct a device ID by sensor fingerprinting.
    • All the sensors’ fingerprints may sum up to enough bits to identify all devices.
    • It is hardware dependent.
    • It can be used by web application.

    A related presentation stated that “this is only the beginning. Many more unexpected information leakages will be found in the coming years. Treat every app you install as having ‘root’ on the phone. And think twice before installing that ‘harmless’ game.”

    Engineers at Robert Bosch GmbH in Germany focused on MEMS-based gyroscopes and showed via wafer-level measurements and simulations that it is feasible to use the physical and electrical properties of these sensors for cryptographic key generation, a key requirement for full rollout of the Internet of Things.

    Teams from Virginia Tech and the University of Essex have published papers detailing similar approaches, basically turning this vulnerability into a tool. “We prove that device identification can be generated by using the accelerometer found in many pervasive devices,” wrote the Essex researchers. “Our experiments are based on a set of health sensors equipped with a MEMS accelerometer. Periodic readings are obtained from the sensor and analyzed mathematically and statistically to generate a stable ICMetric number.”

    Alissa Fitzgerald aided in assembling this overview report.

  • DARPA Seeks Ideas for UAS Aircraft Carrier in the Sky

    The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is asking for input on how to launch and recover multiple small unmanned air systems (UAS) from existing large aircraft, such as the C-130. It has issued a Request for Information (RFI) seeking technical, security and business insights on “aircraft carriers in the sky.”

    In DARPA’s “blended approach,” a large aircraft would host a small UAS and facilitate its operations. The agency says it would be more cost-effective for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance (ISR) and other missions.

    Safety is another key aspect of the project. While small UAS can reduce putting an aircraft or pilot at risk, DARPA says it may lack the speed, range and endurance of larger aircraft.

    “We want to find ways to make smaller aircraft more effective, and one promising idea is enabling existing large aircraft, with minimal modification, to become ‘aircraft carriers in the sky,’” said Dan Patt, DARPA program manager. “We envision innovative launch and recovery concepts for new UAS designs that would couple with recent advances in small payload design and collaborative technologies.”

    The RFI is calling for short responses — no more than eight pages — that must address the following three areas:

    1. System-level technologies and concepts that would enable low-cost reusable small UAS platforms and airborne launch and recovery systems that would require minimal modification of existing large aircraft types. This area includes modeling and simulation as well as feasibility analysis, including substantiating preliminary data if available.
    2. Potentially high-payoff operational concepts and mission applications for distributed airborne capabilities and architectures, as well as relative capability and affordability compared to conventional approaches (e.g., monolithic aircraft and payloads or missile-based approaches). DARPA hopes to leverage significant investments in the area of precision relative navigation, which seeks to enable extremely coordinated flight activities among aircraft, as well as recent and ongoing development of small payloads (100 pounds or less).
    3. Proposed plans for achieving full-system flight demonstrations within four years, to assist in planning for a potential future DARPA program. DARPA is interested not only in what system functionality such plans could reasonably achieve within that timeframe, but also how to best demonstrate this functionality to potential users and transition partners. These notional plans should include rough order-of-magnitude (ROM) cost and schedule information, as well as interim risk reduction and demonstration events to evaluate program progress and validate system feasibility and interim capabilities.

    According to a news release by DARPA, technology development beyond the three areas will be considered if it supports the RFI’s goals.

    Proposals are due by 4 p.m. ET on Nov. 26, 2014, to [email protected].