Academics investigate Safety-Critical applications for Satellite Navigation Systems
Cathryn Mitchell and Robert Watson have
won funding to develop connections between academia, industry and the user community in the vital
area of satellite navigation used in safety-critical systems. Such systems include aviation and
transport. The project will identify the technical problems and potential barriers to the
exploitation of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) in a wide variety of applications
including aircraft landing systems.
The GNSS encompasses all Global Navigation Satellite Systems such as GPS (Global Positioning System) and the forthcoming European Galileo. Although GPS positioning is now widely used, there are a number of applications where it is hindered by integrity problems ("integrity" refers to knowledge of the reliability of the position information derived from the GNSS).
Guaranteeing integrity is literally vital in applications such as aircraft
landing, but at the moment this is very difficult to achieve. The integrity is degraded by the
interactions of GPS radio signals with buildings, terrain, and the Earth's atmosphere and
ionosphere.The Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at the University of Bath has an
international reputation for studying these interactions.
This project will unite industry, academia and representatives from the GPS user community to identify GPS integrity threats and will form strategies to deal with them in the future. The partners involved include Scotec Wireless, IFAC Florence, the University of Southampton, the National Physical Laboratory and Cornell University.
