James L Farrell

Navigation and Tracking – What we do now and what we need to add
– plus various documents, excerpts, summaries, how-to’s & guides to books –

This site is introduced now, in response to recent happenings that call for fundamental changes in widespread applications of navigation and tracking.  A number of events occurring within the past few years have caught the attention of industry executives plus academia plus professional engineering societies plus the Department of Defense. It has also been acknowledged that the problems being uncovered could suddenly get worse at any time.

Changes advocated here will be far-reaching, covering a scope that will broaden with time as further additions are made to this site.  Some of the proposed methods have been known for a few years or more, but many are relatively new and not well known.  I’ll provide 1 page summaries for some and 1-page blogs for several more.  They are also thoroughly documented, along with flight-test validation results, complete with algorithmic formulations that originated with me (my book “GNSS Aided Navigation and Tracking”).  Still others were pioneered at Ohio University under leadership of Prof. Frank vanGraas who either wrote, co-authored, or directed much of the work.

Three crucial items I want to emphasize on this site are

• Insight: By all means learn the math but don’t do only that.  Without insight your  design might be theoretically correct but second-rate – or worse – in performance.
• Robustness: Optimum accuracy at minimal cost doesn’t do it all.  We need to come as close as humanly possible to continuing operation no matter what - redefining our methods as needed.
• Interfacing: Selection of content to be shared can breed success or failure.  A 1990 manuscript discusses data transmitted among subsystems; GNSS Aided Navigation and Tracking extends the raw-data-everywhere concept to data sharing across platforms

• Read my article that appears on the GPS World Website - click here
  Between the Lines: A Fortuitous Meeting;  September 24, 2010 By: James L. Farrell
• Read my co-authored article that appears on the Coordinates Magazine Website - click here
  More GPS or Smarter GPS?  – Sept 2010 James L Farrell, John W Lavrakas
• Read an earlier GPS World Article – click here
• Another GPS World blog post – Can GPS Modernization Be More Effective and Less Costly?

Visitors to this site can expect a growing number of manuscripts and – especially – one-page blogs (or summaries) available for downloading and printing.  Educators in this field may find those “1-pagers” to be especially helpful to their students; stay tuned.

GNSS Aided Navigation & Tracking – Inertially Augmented or Autonomous By James L. Farrell	Integrated Aircraft Navigation By James L. Farrell
Book Now Available – click here for details	Book Now Available – click here for details

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