Tag: IEEE

ION opens registration for IEEE/ION PLANS 2023

Photo: ION

Registration is now open for the jointly sponsored Position Location and Navigation Symposium (PLANS) taking place April 24-27. PLANS is a biennial technical conference that occurs in the spring of odd-numbered years to provide an international forum to share the latest advances in navigation technology. The conference is sponsored by the IEEE’s Aerospace and Electronics Systems Society (AESS) and the Institute of Navigation (ION).

The PLANS conference takes place over four days, with the first day for hosting tutorials and three days dedicated to technical sessions.

The tutorials aim to provide attendees with the opportunity to learn about navigation technology from industry experts. A variety of tutorials are offered to serve the needs of both newcomers and those well versed in the field of navigation. This year’s tutorials will include a range of navigation subjects from core navigation fundamentals to in-depth classes about the latest technologies.

Technical sessions are offered over a three-day period, with four sessions running simultaneously each morning and afternoon. At the technical sessions scientists, researchers, and engineers from around the world present their latest work in the field of PNT. Technical session topics will include inertial sensing and technology; GNSS; integrated, collaborative and opportunistic navigation; and applications to automated, semi-autonomous and fully-autonomous systems.

To view the PLANS 2023 technical program and register for the event, visit ion.org/plans.

December 1, 2022
IEEE to develop PNT standard

Photo: Konstik/iStock / Getty Images Plus/Getty Images

Accurate and reliable positioning, timing and navigation (PNT) technologies, such as GPS, have become “invisible utilities” that enable many critical applications, including the electric grid, telecommunications, agriculture and port operations. These systems, however, are vulnerable to accident and attack, including cyber threats and jamming.

Therefore, the Science and Technology Directorate of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the National Risk Management Center of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency have been working in collaboration with industry and government stakeholders to develop the Resilient PNT Conformance Framework, which provides a common framework for defining resilient PNT systems and addresses strategic risks to U.S. national critical infrastructure. This work is now transitioning to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) as the Standards Working Group for Resilient PNT User Equipment (P1952) and will help serve as starting resources for the refinement and development of a standard.

By creating common definitions for different levels of resilient PNT systems, this new standard will enable vendors to differentiate their products from non-resilient PNT systems, as well as enable end-users to make deliberate, risk-informed decisions as to which systems are most appropriate for their applications and needs. The development of this voluntary standard will help influence the future design, acquisition and deployment of resilient PNT systems within our national critical infrastructure.

The IEEE standards process is an inclusive one, designed to gather many stakeholders interested in resilient PNT. If you would like to participate in the standards working group, just notify the group’s chair (Shelby Savage at [email protected]) or its secretary (Patricia Larkoski at [email protected]). Voting membership requires sufficient participation in work group meetings.

The development of this voluntary standard will help influence the future design, acquisition and deployment of resilient PNT systems.

After the standards working group votes to approve the draft standard, it will be submitted to the membership of the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE SA) for final approval. The IEEE Standards Balloting Center will then send an invitation to any SA members it knows to be interested in the subject matter of the proposed standard, and anyone answering the invitation affirmatively will have a right to vote on the final standard.

Compared to the early days of GPS, PNT systems have become highly sophisticated pieces of equipment with a multitude of components, both hardware and software, along with associated vulnerabilities. Additionally, with a wide array of stakeholders and a variety of ideas on what PNT resilience means, getting consensus and developing such a standard would be challenging without an established process.

To help address this challenge, DHS developed the Resilient PNT Conformance Framework with input from industry stakeholders to establish baseline concepts on the definition of resilience and necessary behaviors within resilient PNT systems. DHS designed this framework to be outcome-based and non-prescriptive, to encourage industry innovation.

“To address security and resilience, GPS and PNT receivers need to be treated more like computers rather than radios,” said Ernest Wong, technical manager for the Science and Technology Directorate. “The refinement of the Resilient PNT Conformance Framework into industry standards will help to ensure that future PNT receivers are resilient and designed to withstand and recover from threats.”

Editor’s Note: This article does not represent a formal position of P1952 Working Group, Communications Society Standards Committee, IEEE, or IEEE SA.

August 16, 2021
IEEE/ION PLANS Conference canceled due to COVID-19 concerns

The IEEE/ION PLANS Conference has been canceled. The conference — officially the IEEE/ION Position Location and Navigation Symposium (PLANS) — was scheduled to take place April 20-23 in Portland, Oregon.

“After careful consideration, the ION Executive Committee, in cooperation with the IEEE/ION PLANS program committee, made the decision this afternoon to cancel,” said ION Executive Director Lisa Beaty in an email sent March 12.

The Institute of Navigation’s (ION’s) official position has been posted here.

The ION National Office has notified PLANS authors, exhibitors and vendors and provided each with additional information pertaining to their particular relationship or circumstance.

“The ION Executive Committee will be discussing additional follow-up considerations later this month,” Beaty said.

March 13, 2020
World’s largest technical professional group focuses on inertial
Inertial 2019, the sixth annual Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Symposium on Inertial Sensors and Systems, took place in Florida earlier this month. Events of particular note included two keynote talks from experts at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT), and a technical paper on the “Design and Performance of Wheel-mounted MEMS Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) for Vehicular Navigation.”

Miniature Sensors. Ronald Polcawich from DARPA addressed “Miniature Navigation Grade Inertial Sensors: Status and Outlook.” The agency’s Precise Robust Inertial Guidance for Munitions (PRIGM) program has focused for more than three years on developing inertial sensor technologies to enable PNT in GPS-denied environments. PRIGM has developed a navigation-grade inertial measurement unit (NGIMU) based on micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) platforms. The device has a mechanical/electronic interface compatible with drop-in replacement for existing tactical-grade IMUs on legacy U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) platforms.

PRIGM’s second main area of interest is advanced inertial micro sensor (AIMS) technologies for future gun-hard, high-bandwidth, high-dynamic-range, GPS-free navigation. It explores alternative technologies and modalities for inertial sensing, including photonic and MEMS-photonic integration, as well as novel architectures and materials systems.

Map-Matching. Aaron Canciani from AFIT educated the many computer scientists, software developers, information technology professionals, physicists and electrical and electronics engineering attendees on “The Importance of INS Accuracy for Map-Matching Navigation.”

The GPS-alternative technique matches measurements from a sensor to a map to provide navigation information. With repeatable measurements, almost any map may be used to navigate. Common maps used for navigation include terrain height, gravity, magnetic fields, Wi-Fi RSS and more. The inertial navigation system often plays a critical role in the accuracy of these methods, and increased INS accuracy plays a synergistic role in an overall map-matching navigation system.

WHEEL-MOUNTED IMUS

In today’s automobiles, MEMS gyroscopes and accelerometers provide essential measurements for enhancing stability and control. Both types of sensors have significant noise at low frequencies, limiting the measurement accuracy, particularly in low-dynamic conditions. Further, uncompensated accelerometer tilt causes large bias to acceleration estimates. For gyroscopes, physical rotation of the sensor can remove the constant part of the gyro errors and reduce low-frequency noise. In ground vehicles, such rotation occurs conveniently in wheels.

When inertial sensors are attached to the wheel, both types of sensors provide information on the rotation, gyroscopes naturally and accelerometers via specific force measurement. As a result of carouseling, accurate wheel heading, roll and pitch estimation can be estimated with high resolution, and the result is nearly bias-free. Combining the wheel orientation to distance traveled via known radius enables classic dead-reckoning mechanization (assuming zero slip) and other vehicle dynamics monitoring systems (considering wheel slip as unknown to be solved).

Authors Jussi Collin of JC Inertial Oy, Finland, and Oleg Mezentsev, Pacific Inertial Systems Inc., Canada, provided details of wheel-mounted inertial system hardware and algorithms and showed test results for several system configurations and applications. They discussed future system improvements — in particular, system miniaturization and an energy-harvesting development progress for next-generation inertial systems.

They have designed a wheel-mountable sensor system that contains MEMS sensors, battery, Bluetooth module and electronics to run computations and navigation algorithms on board. It operates in several programmable modes:
- Computes navigation parameters real time and sends them via Bluetooth to an onboard computer (can be any other integrated system, data logger or a tablet).
- Sends real-time raw data to an onboard computer.
- Records high-rate raw sensor data (up to 2 kHz) to an embedded micro-SD card.
The onboard computer is a MEMS-array IMU with 48 gyro and accelerometer channels, with a BT receiving and sync controller, data storage and Wi-Fi interface. They can connect up to four such units to one onboard computer and have all their data in sync with the in-cabin inertial data. All of this data can be used for navigation, wheel dynamics measurements or road quality monitoring applications.
April 2, 2019