Dr Nagaraj Shivaramaiah from the Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research has won the US Institution of Navigation’s Parkinson Award for outstanding new research, marking the first time that an Australian entry has won.
Dr Shivaramaiah’s doctorate, for the School of Surveying & Spatial Information Systems at the University of New South Wales, caught the attention of the US satellite navigation industry and generated a patent application.
His PhD proposed a number of improvements for signal and receiver design in satellite navigation, particularly for the most sophisticated and promising ‘wideband’ signal known as ‘Alternate Binary-Offset-Carrier’, or more simply as ‘AltBOC’.
BOC signal modulation is at the heart of satellite navigation modernisation. Not only will the US-operated Global Positioning System (GPS) adopt it as it upgrades, but new navigation systems will rely almost exclusively on this signal design. China’s COMPASS satellite system already uses it and Europe’s Galileo system – due to be operational when its 18 satellites are all in orbit by 2014 – will depend on it.
While modernisation delivers greater accuracy, the signals are also far more complex. As a result, receivers are more difficult and expensive to design, and consume a lot more energy when operational – up to 35 times more than current GPS-based models.
But Dr Shivaramaiah’s work has opened the door to major improvements. Not only did he produce a simpler, ‘receiver friendly’ signal with all the same properties as AltBOC, but also developed a less complex AltBOC receiver. A major breakthrough – and the source of the new patent – was its ability to overcome multiple signal reflection, or ‘multipath’, a problem that has plagued current GPS accuracy, especially in cities with their densely packed buildings.
Perhaps even more exciting is the interest of the European Space Agency (ESA). While the technology still has a long way to go before it can be used, it’s opened up the possibility of ESA funding a body outside Europe, a possibility that has been fairly uncommon up till now.
“Nagaraj’s work is a big discovery as it could potentially deliver much greater accuracy in signal navigation,” Professor Andrew Dempster from the UNSW School of Surveying and Spatial Information Systems-and Director of ACSER-said.
“The high calibre of the work has been rightly recognised by the US Institute of Navigation, despite the fact that they rarely nominate any research outside North America for an Award.”
“While we will have to wait and see how ESA responds, it’s already clear that a better method of producing a high performance signal will certainly attract a lot of European attention to this University,” Professor Dempster added.
Dr Shivaramaiah, who moved to Sydney from India in 2007, will pick up his award in Portland, Oregon in the US on the 23rd of September. It could be the start of many more, given that he was already a ION prize winner in 2009 for a student paper, and his PhD also won the UNSW Dean’s Award for Excellence in Postgraduate Research the same year.
He is now a senior researcher at ACSER and is involved in several Australian Government funded projects, particularly the Garada project, where he is responsible for the development of a space-capable multi-GNSS version of UNSW’s Namuru receiver.
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