Stanford Announces GPS Research Center
Stanford University has announced a new research center which will focus on the Global Positioning System (GPS). The research center will be called Research at the Stanford Center for Position, Navigation, and Time (SCPNT).
“Research at the Stanford Center for Position, Navigation, and Time (SCPNT) is aimed at vastly extending and expanding the already revolutionary benefits of GPS in society,” said Per Enge, the center’s research director and a professor of aeronautics and astronautics in the School of Engineering. “Supplementing the system’s reach, accuracy, and resistance to radio frequency interference would make possible diverse new applications such as automated aircraft landing, location-based encryption and eradicating unexploded ordnance.”
Two of the faculty members, Bradford Parkinson and James Spilker were among the original designers of the original GPS system. Stanford and Raytheon were two of the primary facilities who designed the Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS).
SCPNT researchers will be looking into ways to augment the current GPS system with other positioning systems being developed in other countries such as the Russian GLONASS system, the Japanese QZSS system, and the Galileo GPS system being developed in Europe. Further research will look at ways to prevent GPS “jamming”, compensation for signal loss, as well as reducing the cost of GPS integrated circuits.
