Tag: Peter Teunissen

And ION’s prestigious awards go to…

The Institute of Navigation (ION)’s Satellite Division presented two prestigious awards Sept. 20 at the ION GNSS+ Conference in Miami.

Peter Teunissen receives the prestigious 2019 Johannes Kepler Award from ION’s Satellite Division. (Photo: ION)

Peter Teunissen was honored with the career-highlight Johannes Kepler Award. The Johannes Kepler Award recognizes and honors an individual for sustained and significant contributions to the development of satellite navigation. It is the highest honor bestowed by the ION’s Satellite Division.

Teunissen was recognized for his influential and groundbreaking contributions to the algorithmic foundations of satellite navigation, and for sustained dedication to the global education of the next generation of navigation engineers.

Teunissen invented the Least Squares Ambiguity Decorrelation Adjustment (LAMBDA) method, the worldwide standard for ambiguity resolution, which revolutionized high precision GNSS positioning capabilities. LAMBDA has thus become an indispensable tool that is most widely used in land, air and space navigation; positioning and attitude determination; differential and network processing; and in surveying and geodesy. He also extended the method to MC-LAMBDA, a multivariate constrained resolution method for optimal GNSS attitude determination.

Among others, Teunissen laid the mathematical and algorithmic foundation of reliability theory, which enables a proper understanding of the quality of different integer ambiguity resolution methods and a rigorous characterization of their failure rates, which even led to the development of an optimal test for ambiguity validation.

His findings are particularly important for multi-GNSS processing, which require a proper understanding of individual system characteristics and their respective contributions to achieve navigation solutions of the highest precision and integrity.

Teunissen has made contributions in the field of precise point positioning, the exploitation of triple-frequency observation, and the joint use of new GNSS such as Galileo, BeiDou and QZSS. Pioneering work in this area include the early setup of multi-GNSS receiver test beds in the Asia-Pacific area; the discovery and proper handling of mixed-receiver inter-satellite-type biases, which were vital to fully exploit ambiguity resolution in the regional, BeiDou-2 system; and the first demonstrations of mixed GPS/Galileo/IRNSS/QZSS L5 processing for precise positioning applications.

Teunissen has made significant contributions to educating future generations. He is currently a Professor of Satellite Navigation at Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands and Curtin University, Australia.

He received his Ph.D. at Delft University of Technology in Mathematical and Physical Geodesy. He holds several honorary professorships and fellowships of numerous international organizations, including Australia’s prestigious Federation Fellowship of the Australian Research Council.

He has published more than 300 papers, seven books, is co-editor and author of the Handbook of Global Navigation Satellite Systems, and is a member of 13 editorial boards.

He is a regular contributor to ION and ION programs. He is a Fellow of the ION, the RIN and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences.

Advanced RAIM topic earns Diaz the Parkinson Award

Santiago Perea Diaz receives the 2019 Bradford W. Parkinson Award from ION’s Satellite Division. (Photo: ION)

The Bradford W. Parkinson Award recognizes an outstanding graduate student in GNSS. It is presented in honor of Parkinson for his leadership in establishing the U.S. GPS and for his work on behalf of ION’s Satellite Division.

Santiago Perea Diaz was recognized for graduate student excellence in GNSS in his thesis, “Design of an Integrity Support Message for Offline Advanced RAIM.”

Any graduate student who is a member of the ION and is completing a degree program with an emphasis in GNSS technology, applications, or policy is eligible for the award.

October 1, 2019
University research uses smartphones for precision GNSS

New research conducted at the University of Otago, New Zealand, and published in the August issue of Journal of Geodesy demonstrate that it is possible to achieve centimeter(cm)-level precise positioning on a smartphone.

The research, conducted in collaboration with Curtin University, Australia, combined signals from four different GNSS, according to Otago’s Dr. Robert Odolinski and Curtin University colleague Prof. Peter Teunissen.

“It’s all down to the mathematics we applied to make the most of the relatively low-cost technology smartphones use to receive GNSS signals, combining data from American, Chinese, Japanese and European GNSS. We believe this new capability will revolutionize applications that require cm-level positioning,” Odolinski says.

He said to understand the new technology, a look back at the historical scientific context is needed.

Precise centimeter-level positioning on a smartphone during 24 hours in Dunedin, New Zealand. Blue dots show repeatability of one epoch data in comparison to precise benchmark coordinates. The repeatability is more or less the size of a one-dollar New Zealand coin (diameter of 2.3 cm) in all three dimensions. (Image: University of Otago)

“For decades, construction, engineering, cadastral surveying and earthquake monitoring have relied on high-cost, dual-frequency GPS positioning to obtain centimeter-level location information. The challenge is that GPS signals, traveling from Earth-orbiting satellites to receivers on the ground, are disrupted along the way, and this generates errors and limiting precision.

“The traditional solution is to combine GPS signals sent at two different frequencies to improve the positions, but the antennas and receivers required have been expensive, far beyond the reach of many who would benefit from the technology,” Odolinski said.

The new approach uses only one of two frequencies but collects data from more satellites for a multi-constellation GNSS solution. The extra data and algorithms are used to improve the positions without adding cost.

Odolinski and Teunissen have shown that this approach can work in smartphones, producing competitive results compared to dual-frequency GPS solutions (see figure).

Odolinski believes that countries and industries of all sizes can benefit from using smartphones as GNSS receivers, and is confident commercial application and development will spring from this research.

“This significant reduction in costs when using smartphones can increase the number of receivers that can be deployed, which will revolutionize a range of disciplines requiring centimeter-level positioning, including precise car navigation, surveying and geophysics (deformation monitoring), to name a few.”

Read the full research paper.

Robert Odolinski configuries a smartphone to collect multi-GNSS data. (Photo: University of Otago)

September 17, 2018
QZSS satellites benefit Western Australia industries, study shows

Curtin University researchers found the launch of new Japanese satellites has boosted satellite positioning capabilities in Western Australia (WA), offering huge potential benefits across numerous industries including mining, surveying and navigation.

New research, published in the journal GPS Solutions, found signals from the recently launched Japanese QZSS satellites provide centimeter-level positioning accuracy, and thus significantly enhanced positioning capabilities in WA, thereby improving accuracy, reliability and availability.

Lead researcher Professor Peter Teunissen, of Curtin’s School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, said these results will improve further when the QZSS signals are combined with those from other satellite systems such as the Indian NavIC system.

Teunissen said the analyses done by Curtin’s GNSS Research Centre demonstrated the highly accurate centimeter-level positioning capabilities that can now be achieved.

“Such improved positioning, accuracy and reliability would offer great benefits when applied in fields such as open-pit mining, surveying, hydrography, automated navigation, structural health monitoring, and subsidence and tectonic deformation monitoring used in the geospatial industry,” Teunissen said. “The benefits are not only restricted to positioning, but cover the whole range of satellite signal applications, including atmospheric sensing (ionosphere and troposphere) as used for climate change and space weather studies, and numerical weather prediction.”

Teunissen said WA was in the fortunate and unique geographical position of being located beneath the flight paths of both the Japanese QZSS and the Indian NavIC regional satellite systems.

“Using both satellite systems, QZSS and NavIC, offers huge benefits to users in Australia – and this is an opportunity to work on future developments with such technologies,” Professor Teunissen said.

“The United States of America, for example, can’t use these signals the way we can in Australia, so this places us in a position of great advantage when it comes to the understanding, modelling and analyses of these satellite signals and their many practical applications.

“The tracking and analyses were done using Javad GNSS receivers and Curtin’s theory of integer ambiguity resolution, which enables millimeter-level satellite ranging, and was achieved with the use of only the four currently available QZSS satellites.”

The results bode well for the future, with the Japanese system being further developed from the current four-satellite system into a mature seven-satellite system that is expected to be operational by 2020.

The report, “Australia-First High-Precision Positioning Results with New Japanese QZSS Regional Satellite System,“ is available online.

July 30, 2018