September 20, 2007 :: No. 38

Mohinder Grewal, professor of electrical engineering at Cal State Fullerton, will give two tutorials in Texas this month related to satellite-based navigation and positioning.

He will present “Fundamentals of Kalman Filtering for GPS/INS Integration” Sept. 24 and “Fundamentals of SBAS Design” Sept. 25.  GPS is Global Positioning System; INS is Inertial Navigation Systems; and SBAS is Satellite Based Augmentation System.

The tutorials, which will be held at the Hilton Hotel in Fort Worth, Texas, are the lead-in to the 2007 Institute of Navigation Global Navigation Satellite System (ION GNSS) technical   conference. Invited to the conference are all of those named among the “50+ Leaders to Watch” for advancements in space-based positioning, navigation and timing systems for both 2006-07 and 2007-08. Grewal is among the 50 named for 2007-08. Each year, the leaders to watch are chosen from the ranks of thousands of experts worldwide by the international online magazine GPS World.

The ION GNSS 2007 conference, which focuses on satellites, is one of three conferences the international organization hosts each year. The conference will be held in the Petroleum Club in Forth Worth through Sept. 28.

Kalman Filtering is a mathematical algorithm that is an integral part of GPS technology. It is used to alleviate interference in order to accurately track a moving object, such as an airplane, a ship or automobile.

Interference can include the movement of the object, movement of the satellite and even radiation bursts from the sun. SBAS is a system that makes use of multiple satellites and ground stations to make positioning information very accurate.

Grewal Grewal is the co-author of “Global Positioning Systems, Inertial Navigation and Integration” and “Kalman Filtering: Theory and Practice Using MATLAB,” both published by Wiley & Sons. He has done groundbreaking work in an aspect of SBAS, Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS), which is a major factor in making it possible for an airplane to land by GPS alone. As Grewal puts it, “You just can’t have a 10-meter error when an airplane is landing.”

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