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.
The Institute of Navigation is seeking abstracts for the 2023 Joint Navigation Conference (JNC 2023) for the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. The Military Division of the Institute of Navigation will host the conference taking place June 11-15 in San Diego.
The exhibit hall will be open to all conference participants, exhibitors, their employees and related organizations. All materials displayed in the exhibit hall shall be Publically Releasable After Review.
The theme of this year’s conference will be “Enhancing Dominance and Resilience for Warfighting and Homeland Security PNT”.
JNC is the largest U.S. military Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) conference of the year with joint service and government participation. The event will focus on technical advances in PNT with an emphasis on joint development, testing and support of affordable PNT systems, logistics and integration.
The conference will also focus on advances in battlefield applications of GPS; critical strengths and weaknesses of field navigation devices; warfighter PNT requirements and solutions; and navigation warfare.
Abstracts must be written for public release with the intent to present in a Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) U.S. only environment. Abstracts not approved for public release will not be accepted. Abstracts should be submitted via ion.org/abstracts by February 3.
The Google Smartphone Decimeter Challenge (SDC) competition, co-sponsored by the Institute of Navigation (ION), took place this summer. For the competition, teams developed high-precision GNSS positioning using a pool of smartphone GNSS + inertial measurement unit (IMU) datasets accompanied by high-accuracy ground truth. Teams competed to achieve the best location accuracy with the datasets provided. Winners received cash prizes and sponsored attendance at the ION GNSS+ 2022 conference in Denver, Sept. 19-23, to present their results.
Origins
The SDC has its origins in the Android Operating System, which is an open-source platform. In 2016, Google made GNSS raw measurements available as a public application programming interface (API) on all Android phones. Since then, the available measurements have become more sophisticated and more accurate. For example, dual-frequency carrier-phase data is now available on many Android phones. This enables new areas of research.
Goals
The competition had two goals:
• Stimulate the research and development of high-accuracy algorithms that can produce submeter position accuracy on phones.
• Establish a publicly accessible repository of labeled data so that all future research on location algorithms can be judged in a consistent way against a standard set of data.
The first goal was met beyond our expectations. A total of 1,381 teams participated in the two competitions of 2021 and 2022. Discussion among competitors on the competition platform (kaggle.com) was wide-ranging, incredibly collegial, and beneficial to the entire community.
Competitors have written and shared detailed descriptions, and these have been reviewed and commented on by other competitors. Moreover, winners have written formally peer-reviewed papers and made presentations at the ION GNSS+ conferences, which are available from ion.org.
The second goal is a work-in-progress and is intended to be the legacy of the events.
Legacy
Disciplines such as machine learning have established benchmarks that make it possible to compare new approaches to previous ones in a proper quantitative way. In the GNSS community, this convention has been missing — a glance across papers at conferences will show that different algorithms tend to be presented with different test data and different metrics. Usually, the authors collect this data, and it is often fairly sparse (one or two drive tests, for example). Also, the reader never knows whether the data was cherry-picked (were bad results not mentioned?).
The SDC data provides:
• 206 different drive tests
•86 total hours of dual-frequency (L1, L5) data with code and carrier-phase measurements
•All labeled with ground-truth positions and velocities collected using NovAtel SPAN ISA-100C, with precise lever-arm compensation and validated with Google’s analysis tools.
The Kaggle site allowed users to submit their results, then automatically scored them against the ground-truth data. We advocate that all GNSS researchers use this resource to measure their location algorithm improvements in a standard way. This creates trust in published results, accelerating the recognition and adoption of truly great improvements for the benefit of the entire industry and GNSS users worldwide.
The top three winners of this year’s Smartphone Decimeter Challenge described their projects to Matteo Luccio, GPS World editor-in-chief.
Suzuki
Taro Suzuki, Chiba Institute of Technology
1st Place Winner: Two-Step Optimization of Velocity and Position using Smartphone’s Carrier Phase Observations
What is your research focus and how does it relate to the contest?
My current research focuses on the accurate positioning of vehicles and mobile robots in urban environments where GNSS multipath occurs. I usually use commercial GNSS receivers for my research. This competition is very relevant to my current research, except that the smartphone is replacing a receiver.
How long have you been developing the technology or approach you used to win the contest?
The competition was held for three months, but I concentrated my efforts on the past three weeks. However, I used technologies and resources developed in my previous research (for example, source code developed in last year’s competition).
Have you participated in previous editions of this contest?
Yes, I participated in the last competition and won. The approach used in this year’s competition is based on the method used to win last year’s competition, with additional innovations and improvements.
Where, in what GNSS signal conditions, and at what speeds were the test data collected?
The competition provides a training dataset, which contains raw GNSS observations from a smartphone installed on a vehicle as it travels on real roads. In addition to GNSS observations, the training dataset contains the ground truth of the smartphone’s position. The training dataset includes a wide range of GNSS signal conditions, such as driving on highways around San Francisco and Los Angeles, driving on tree-lined urban streets, and driving in tunnels and under overpasses. I have developed an algorithm that uses a training dataset containing ground truth to accurately estimate the location of smartphones in a variety of GNSS signal reception environments.
What accuracies were you able to obtain?
The competition metric was “average of 50th and 95th percentile horizontal errors.” The metrics are computed for each of the 36 runs in the test dataset, which are divided into public and private groups, then the metrics are averaged in each group to compute the final score. My final score was 1.382 m for public and 1.229 m for private. The best score given after the competition was 1.372 m for public and 1.197 m for private. The final result achieved sub-meter accuracy in the median (50th percentile).
What are the key features of your approach?
The key point of my method is global optimization using graph optimization, unlike a conventional Kalman filter or least-squares-based positioning methods. In addition, highly accurate relative position estimation using the time difference of carrier wave phases of smartphones contributed to the accuracy. Because the competition dataset included environments such as tunnels and elevated structures in which GNSS cannot be received at all, I devised an algorithm with two optimization steps (first velocity optimization, then position optimization) and applied it to the competition. This method enables highly accurate position estimation for vehicle driving data in various GNSS signal reception environments using only smartphone GNSS observation data.
What end-user applications are you expecting your approach to enable?
Decimeter-accurate location estimation could lead to lane-level navigation for vehicles, pedestrian navigation, and advanced location-based smartphone games.
Dai
Shubin Dai, Kaggle Community
2nd Place Winner: Improving Smartphone GNSS positioning using Gradient Descent Method
What is your research focus and how does it relate to the contest?
I am a data scientist and one of the top competition grandmasters on Kaggle. My research interests include computer vision, natural language processing, autonomous driving, and reinforcement learning. I placed in the top three in 14 related competitions (13 of which were solo). So, despite my lack of background knowledge in the GNSS field, these methods, skills and experiences helped me find a solution.
How long have you been developing the technology or approach you used to win the contest?
I spent about 50 days on this competition, including learning principles of GNSS and understanding all kinds of algorithms by reading books, papers and source codes. The Kaggle platform is very helpful when we want to get started in a new field.
Have you participated in previous editions of this contest?
I did not participate in the competition held last year, but I learned a lot from solutions of recent years, particularly the third-place solution.
Where, in what GNSS signal conditions, and at what speeds were the test data collected?
The benchmark datasets include raw GNSS measurement and raw readings from inertial sensors, using smartphones (Xiaomi Mi 8, Google Pixel 4, etc.) enabled with dual-frequency and ADR (accumulated delta range) in driving scenarios, collected in the San Francisco Bay area.
In the GSDC2021 dataset, there are 29 drives with 73 phone GNSS logs in the training set and 19 drives with 48 phone logs in the test set. Compared to 2021’s competition, in the GSDC2022 dataset we can see more data overall and a wider variety of routes: 62 drives with 170 phone logs are provided in the training set and 36 drives with only one phone per drive are provided in the test set.
The drives in the training set took 15 to 60 minutes at an average speed of 18 m/s.
What accuracies were you able to obtain?
According to the metric of this competition, the score is calculated as the mean of the 50th and 95th percentile distance errors. The score on my local validation set is 1.929 m, the score on the public test set is 1.608 m, and the score on private test set is 1.499 m. When we calculate the mean error, the score is 1.401 m on a validated set, the mean error of 40% of the trips are under 1 m. I think the competition metric is more reliable as the 95th percentile distance error is also important.
By the way, my local validation set is more difficult to optimize than the test set, so the mean error on the test set is expected to be lower than 1.401 m.
What are the key features of your approach?
The competition data is noisy due to multipath effects, non-line-of-sight receptions, receiver noise and missing data, therefore it’s quite challenging. I found that the optimal estimation for each point locally is not stable and can be affected by noise at that point on the track. If we can find a solution to a whole track globally, the noise can be reduced as the model must follow all kinds of constraints, such as geometry constraints, speed constrains, and global acceleration constraints.
Although we could extend the WLS and Kalman filter solution to take more points on a track into consideration, it’s not so easy to model all kinds of constrains. On the other hand, if we use a global optimization method, such as factor graph optimization and neural networks, we can add the constrains easily, which makes it more efficient to conduct experiments.
Following the solution of the third-place winner in last year’s competition, I used the global optimization method by taking into account gradient descent, pseudorange, pseudorange rate, accumulated carrier phase (ADR), phone speed and acceleration constraints of every time epoch on a track. When optimizing the track using gradient descent, the losses are designed to filter out abnormal data and reduce the noise by a series of physical and geometrical rules. I spent much time searching for the constraints, proving them and turning them into losses that can be used to update the coordinates iteratively during the competition.
What end-user applications are you expecting your approach to enable?
According to the setting of this competition, we can post-process data collected using Android phones, which is easily obtained. The track obtained can then be optimized using the solutions from this competition. The solutions from the first and the second place can both be considered as a framework that can be extended by adding more constrains to it to improve accuracy.
Everett
Tim Everett, RTK Consultants LLC
3rd Place Winner: An RTKLIB Open-Source-Based Solution
What is your research focus and how does it relate to the contest?
I develop and maintain the demo5 fork of the popular RTKLIB open-source GPS/GNSS software tool. I have optimized this software for low-cost precision GNSS solutions, so it is very closely related to the goals of this competition. My background is in control system theory and I worked in product and technology development for servo systems in the disk drive industry for 25 years before switching to the GNSS field. The mathematics turns out to be quite similar between the two as both are problems in precision positioning, just different in scale. In disk drives, it is nanometers over centimeters and in precision GNSS, it is centimeters over kilometers.
How long have you been developing the technology or approach you used to win the contest?
I have been developing and maintaining low-cost precision GNSS solutions in the RTKLIB software for about six years but have only worked with smartphone solutions in the last year or two.
Have you participated in previous editions of this contest?
I did not participate in last year’s competition but I did work with the data after the contest was over and shared a solution using RTKLIB that would have placed fifth in the competition.
What accuracies were you able to obtain?
I achieved a score of 1.648 m on the private leaderboard. This represents the average of the 50th percentile and the 95th percentile of the errors as scored by Kaggle. Kaggle does not provide any further breakdown of this number but, based on the training data for which ground truths were provided, this corresponded to a 50th percentile error of roughly 0.9 m and a 95th percentile error of roughly 2.3 m. With a small tweak to my solution after the competition was over, I was able to improve my private leaderboard score to 1.593 m, which would have been within 1 cm of the third-place solution.
What are the key features of your approach?
My approach was to use the existing post-processing kinematic (PPK) solution algorithm in RTKLIB but to reoptimize it for the unique characteristics of the smartphone observation data. A PPK solution is the post-processing equivalent of a real-time kinematic (RTK) solution and is a differential solution that relies on differencing the receiver observations with observations from a nearby base station to cancel out most of the largest error sources — including atmospheric, orbital and clock errors — since these errors are common between the two sets of proximate observations.
Because smartphones have very poor GNSS antennas and they were mounted inside vehicles, the signal quality is much lower and the multipath much greater than those for which the RTKLIB algorithm was optimized. In addition, the smartphones were using the L5 frequency band, whereas RTKLIB was optimized for the more commonly used L2 frequency band. One of the main goals of my optimization process was to include many low-quality observations in the solution that would normally be discarded, but to de-weight them appropriately.
What end-user applications are you expecting your approach to enable?
RTKLIB software is currently used to provide precision solutions for many end-user applications such as surveying, drone photogrammetry, sports tracking, precision agriculture, utility location, marine navigation and ground subsistence monitoring. Although smartphones won’t replace dedicated low-cost GNSS receivers, the challenging nature of the smartphone data severely stresses the RTKLIB algorithms and exposes numerous opportunities for improvement that are much less obvious with more typical, higher quality data. I have pulled these improvements into the main branch of the demo5 version of RTKLIB, and hence this work should immediately improve the quality of all these applications and extend their use into more challenging environments.
Photo: Google
Acknowledgements: Thanks to the Institute of Navigation (ION) for co-sponsoring the 2022 Smartphone Decimeter Challenge. Thanks to Luke Walcher and Tolu Ojelade for their contributions to the photos used in this article.
Submit your abstract for the Institute of Navigation’s (ION) combined International Technical Meeting (ITM) and the Precise Time and Time Interval (PTTI) Systems and Applications Meeting 2023. The co-located conferences will take place January 23-26 at the Hyatt Regency Long Beach, Long Beach, California. Both in-person and virtual presentation options will be available.
The International Technical Meeting (ITM), is is the ION’s winter meeting, with technical papers related to positioning, navigation and timing and includes the ION Fellows and Annual Awards presentations.
The Precise Time and Time Interval Systems and Applications (PTTI) meeting is an annual conference sponsored by ION with a technical program designed to disseminate and coordinate PTTI information at the user level, review present and future PTTI requirements, inform government and industry engineers, technicians, and managers of precise time and frequency technology and its problems, and provide an opportunity for an active exchange of new technology associated with PTTI.
Of the 60 exhibitors at the Institute of Navigation’s Joint Navigation Conference (JNC) in San Diego this year, 16 make inertial navigation systems (INS). Many of the other exhibitors integrate INS with GNSS receivers or make simulators to test those integrations. Several exhibitors make a variety of other navigation systems, using active and passive optical sensors, wheel encoders and RF systems that map beacons of opportunity. Only seven manufacturers of GNSS receivers were present.
That’s because the conference — which took place June 6-9 and focused on technical advances in positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) — was hosted by ION’s Military Division for the Departments of Defense (DOD) and Homeland Security. “From an operational perspective,” said the conference program, it focused on “advances in battlefield applications of GPS; critical strengths and weaknesses of field navigation devices; warfighter PNT requirements and solutions; and navigation warfare.” In other words, it was mostly on how to navigate in environments in which the use of GNSS is challenged or denied due to jamming.
The conference program told the story of the GNSS/PNT community’s interests and concerns. Several sessions were on complementary PNT using terrestrial RF signals of opportunity, IMUs, geophysical fields (including gravity and Earth’s magnetic field), celestial objects, ground vision and new commercial sources of space-based PNT, such as satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO).
Other environments in which reliance on GNSS is hard or impossible — such as urban canyons, deep inside buildings, underground and underwater — pose the same navigation challenges to both military and civilian applications. Likewise, jamming is a threat to both. Therefore, several sessions focused on critical infrastructure, demonstrating that the concerns about GNSS vulnerabilities are not just military ones.
Hence the presence among the exhibitors of three manufacturers of atomic clocks, which continue to shrink in size, weight, power and cost (SWaP-C) and are used to assure holdover — that is, the time period required to keep networks synchronized when their primary timing source, usually GNSS, is disrupted or temporarily unavailable. Networks affected include cellphone providers, radio and television broadcasters, financial networks, and the biggest network of all, the Internet.
The JNC “experienced record attendance in both conference participants and exhibitors, hosting more than 1,000 attendees,” Lisa Beaty, ION executive director, told me. She attributed the increase to “the importance of PNT in the nation’s critical infrastructure, current innovation, programmatic funding, and the desire by the DOD community to collaborate and reconvene.” She confidently anticipates additional growth next year.
I am equally confident that much of the cutting-edge technology on display at this conference will find its way into civilian applications in the next few years. Whether in war or in urban canyons, GNSS navigation faces some of the same challenges.
ION is now accepting abstracts for the co-located 2023 International Technical Meeting (ITM) and Precise Time and Time Interval (PTTI) Systems and Applications Meeting. The co-located conferences will take place January 23-26, 2023 at the Hyatt Regency Long Beach, in Long Beach, California.
ION strongly encourages authors to present in-person in Long Beach. Authors will be given the option at the point of abstract submission to submit for “in-person presentation with video presentation for remote viewers” or “virtual presentation only.”
The Precise Time and Time Interval Systems and Applications (PTTI) meeting is an annual conference sponsored by ION with a technical program designed to disseminate and coordinate PTTI information at the user level, review present and future PTTI requirements, inform government and industry engineers, technicians, and managers of precise time and frequency technology and its problems, and provide an opportunity for an active exchange of new technology associated with PTTI.
ION’s winter meeting, the International Technical Meeting (ITM), is a more intimate conference with a technical program related to positioning, navigation and timing and includes the ION Fellows and Annual Awards presentations.
The open access portal for NAVIGATION: Journal of the Institute of Navigation is now live at live at navi.ion.org.
“ION has partnered with HighWire Press to host its new open access portal for NAVIGATION giving readers a sophisticated platform that offers superior search tools, advanced research capabilities, new citation tools and article alerts,” said Lisa Beaty, ION’s executive director.
“NAVIGATION’s open access portal will allow for the rapid dissemination of cutting-edge, high-impact research across the breadth of the field of positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) as well as all related areas intersecting with PNT,” Beaty added.
PNT researchers, academicians and industry members can now access free and open research through NAVIGATION’s new portal. The portal makes it easier to:
download NAVIGATION open access papers for reading, sharing and citating
Abstracts for the ION GNSS+ 2022 show, “GNSS + Other Sensors in Today’s Marketplace,” are due March 4.
The ION GNSS+ conference will take place September 19-23 at the Hyatt Regency Denver at Colorado Convention Center in Denver. The show will also include a virtual option.
The 2022 conference will bring together international leaders in GNSS and related positioning, navigation and timing fields to present new research, introduce new technologies, discuss current policy, demonstrate products and exchange ideas.
The two tracks covered during the conference will be commercial and policy tracks and research tracks.
The commercial and policy tracks will include high performance and safety critical applications, status and future trends in GNSS, and mass market and commercial applications. The research tracks will include multisensor and autonomous navigation, algorithms and methods, and advanced GNSS technologies.
ION’s Pacific PNT Conference is a global cooperative development of Positioning, Navigation and Timing technology and applications where policy and technical leaders from around the world meet to discuss policy updates, receive program status updates and exchange technical information.
The 2022 conference will be hosted virtually April 11-13 PDT on a complimentary basis for ION members. The conference will include sessions on policy and status updates, performance schedules and plans, plus special challenges affecting Asia-Pacific presented by an elite list of experts representing BeiDou, COSMIC/ FORMOSAT, and QZSS.
A session will broadcast each day at 9:00 a.m. JST / 5:00 p.m. PDT. Live-stream attendees will have the opportunity to participate in virtual question and answer periods through the portal.
Register today to attend the ION’s co-located International Technical Meeting (ITM) and the Precise Time and Time Interval (PTTI) Systems and Applications Meeting, being held January 25–27, 2022, at the Hyatt Regency Long Beach in Long Beach, California, with technical presentations available for on-demand viewing at ion.org.
Plenary and Keynote Sessions
The ITM/PTTI 2022 keynote addresses, “Traffic Jams, Autonomy, and Lagrangian Control” and “The Future of Industrial Atomic Clocks,” taking place on Tuesday, January 25 will be recorded live and uploaded for on-demand viewing through the ITM/PTTI 2022 virtual meeting portal.
Technical Sessions
Individual technical presentations will be pre-recorded and uploaded with slides to the ITM/PTTI 2022 virtual meeting portal for viewing at a time of your choosing, and will remain available for 30 days. Attendees will have the option to submit questions to each presenter. View the full online Technical Program now!
Exhibit Experience
ITM/PTTI 2022 features industry partners with expanded exhibitor profiles, that allow attendees to review the latest PNT-related technologies, products, and product demonstration videos.
Terry Moore is the first British academic to take home the John Harrison Award for outstanding contributions to navigation.
Terry Moore
Terry Moore, a positioning and navigation expert at the University of Nottingham and longtime GPS World Editorial Advisory Board member and author, has become the first British academic to win a prestigious international award in the field.
Terry Moore is an Emeritus Professor and former director of the Nottingham Geospatial Institute at the University’s Faculty of Engineering.
The International Association of Institutes of Navigation (IAIN) awarded Moore with its John Harrison Award for outstanding contributions to navigation. The award ceremony took place during a special session of the Navigation 2021 Conference in Edinburgh, which took place Nov. 16-18.
HRH The Princess Royal (Princess Anne) attended via Zoom to present the award, and had a one-to-one conversation with Professor Moore.
The John Harrison award is a premier global award in the navigation field and Professor Moore is its first British winner.
“It’s a great honor to be recognized by the global navigation community, and I feel quite humbled,” Moore said. “John Harrison was a simple country carpenter in the 18th century who solved the major problem of measuring longitude at sea, through his remarkable marine chronometers. Despite his genius, he struggled for acceptance by the scientific establishment, and it took many years until he received the recognition (and financial reward) he deserved. It is sad that over 200 years later we are still fighting for improved equality, diversity and inclusion throughout scientific disciplines. I am absolutely delighted to receive the award in his name.”
A professor of satellite navigation for 20 years at the university, Moore’s association with Nottingham goes back to his undergraduate degree starting in 1979. During his distinguished career, all of it spent at Nottingham, he has taken a leading role in national and European initiatives aimed at integrating academic research and teaching activities in GNSS. He has also interacted closely with industry throughout that time.
He was the founding director of GRACE — the GNSS Research and Applications Centre of Excellence — which was jointly funded by the University and the East Midlands Development Agency and has now been extended to cover all geospatial applications as the Geospatial Research and Applications Centre of Excellence.
Moore has overseen numerous research projects funded by industry, research councils, the European Space Agency and the European Commission, and has supervised almost 40 successful PhD students.
He is a Chartered Engineer, a Fellow and the Immediate Past President of the Royal Institute of Navigation (RIN) and also a Fellow and a Member of Council of the Institute of Navigation (ION) in the United States. He was recently elected as the Chair of the European Group of Institutes of Navigation (EUGIN), and is an Honorary Member of IAIN. In 2013 he was awarded the RIN Harold Spencer-Jones Gold Medal. He received RIN’s J E D Williams Medal and the ION Johannes Kepler Award, both in 2017.
Professor Moore is a member of the U.S. National Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) Advisory Board and is a Member of the European Space Agency (ESA) GNSS Science Advisory Committee. He was an expert contributing to the UK Government Blackett Review on GNSS Vulnerability and has worked extensively on the UK’s PNT Strategy.
He is a Fellow of the Chartered Institution of Civil Engineering Surveyors, a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, and an Associate Fellow of the Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry Society, and is a Member of the Editorial Advisory Council of The Journal of Navigation.
“Many congratulations to Terry on this outstanding achievement,” said Stuart Marsh, director of the NGI. “It is fantastic to see our former director, who has spent so many years of his career in our faculty, serving in many different capacities, receive such a high honor.”
NAVIGATION is a leading peer-reviewed and indexed scientific journal publishing articles on all areas related to the art and science of positioning, navigation and timing (PNT).
Printed paper copies of NAVIGATION will be discontinued beginning with the Spring 2022 issue. Instead, ION members will receive an environmentally friendly link to download a compiled electronic copy of each issue.
“Moving NAVIGATION to an open access domain is critical to supporting ION’s mission of advancing positioning, navigation and timing,” said Lisa Beaty, managing editor and executive director of ION. “Moving NAVIGATION to an OA platform will speed the delivery of timely PNT research, without the restrictions of paywalls or price barriers, to a worldwide audience. We want all scientists and engineers to be able to collaborate, analyze and build upon each other’s work for society’s common good.”
The NAVIGATION Editorial Advisory Board’s recommendation to the ION Council to move to an OA model is in keeping with the growing trend to broaden the impact and availability of scholarly research. OA has been shown to increase citations, increase readership, improve the quality of paper submissions, improve search engine prioritization, and increase a Journal’s Impact Factor (JIF). The ION Council approved this recommendation at its July 16 meeting.
The past two years of technical papers that have been published in NAVIGATION will now be available free through the ION website, and after Jan. 1, 2022, will be made available through numerous indexed and abstracted scientific bibliographic databases including:
Science Citation Index Expanded (Clarivate Analytics)
SciTech Premium Collection (ProQuest)
SCOPUS (Elsevier)
Technology Collection (ProQuest)
Web of Science (Clarivate Analytics).
NAVIGATION’s Open Access model will also be coupled with changes to ION membership. The Institute of Navigation will eliminate the price differential that was required to cover international mailing costs for members who reside outside the United States.
Professional membership will increase benefits to include 12 complimentary technical paper downloads per month — up from 12 per year — from ION’s extensive database of technical papers published in official ION conference proceedings. Students, Retired and Corporate Associate members will also now enjoy 12 complimentary technical paper downloads per month. Premium Professional Member downloads will double from 25 to 50 complimentary technical paper downloads per month.
Abstracts for 
