Professor Zak M. Kassas
Professor Zak Kassas is a world-renowned expert in resilient and alternative positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT). He is the TRC Endowed Chair in Intelligent Transportation Systems and Professor at The Ohio State University. He is also the Director of CARMEN+, a U.S. Department of Transportation Center focused on PNT resiliency and cybersecurity for highly automated transportation systems.
Kassas is a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from President Biden, the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding early-career scientists and engineers. He is widely recognized for pioneering technologies that enable assured navigation in GPS-challenged environments. Ranked as the world’s top navigation scholar, he has received more than 60 scientific and governmental honors, including the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society Richard Kershner Award, the society’s highest honor for contributions to navigation technology; IEEE Walter Fried Award; IEEE Harry Rowe Mimno Award; IEEE M. Barry Carlton Award; IEEE Frederick W. Ellersick Award; ION Samuel Burka Award (twice); ION Col. Thomas Thurlow Award; NSF CAREER award; ONR Young Investigator Program (YIP) award; and AFOSR YIP award. His research has attracted more than $28 million in competitive funding and influenced government programs, policies, and investments.
His innovations and insights have been featured in hundreds of media outlets and invited for presentation at venues including the United Nations, the Pentagon, and Capitol Hill.
We are witnessing a space renaissance. Tens of thousands of broadband low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites are expected to be launched by the end of this decade. These planned megaconstellations of LEO satellites along with existing constellations will shower the Earth with a plethora of signals of opportunity, diverse in frequency and direction. These signals could be exploited for positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) in the inevitable event that global navigation satellite system (GNSS) signals become unavailable (e.g., in deep urban canyons, under dense foliage, during unintentional interference, and intentional jamming) or untrustworthy (e.g., under malicious spoofing attacks).
This talk will overview the challenges associated with exploiting non-cooperative megaconstellation LEO satellites for PNT purposes, namely their unknown signals, poorly known ephemerides, loose synchronization and oscillator instability, and propagation effects. Next, a framework termed STAN: simultaneous tracking and navigation will be introduced to overcome these challenges. We will present an end-to-end approach, spanning theoretical modeling and analysis, specialized cognitive software-defined radio (SDR) design, and practical PNT algorithms. We will show STAN’s efficacy in exploiting real-world multi-constellation LEO satellite signals (Starlink, OneWeb, Orbcomm, Iridium, NOAA, and Xona).
We will also show experimental demonstrations of STAN on ground vehicles, unmanned aerial vehicles, stratospheric balloons, maritime vessels in the Arctic, and PNT on the edge of Earth to an unprecedented level-of-accuracy. Insights into future research directions and engineering implementation challenges will be provided as concluding remarks.
