About Me

Profile Overview

I perform functional formulations and algorithm generation plus validation for both simulation and operational purposes in system integration. Specific areas include navigation, communication, data integrity, and tracking for aerospace, applying modern estimation to data from various sources (COMM, gyros, accelerometers, GPS/GNSS, radar, optical, etc.). 

Navigation and Tracking – What we do now, what we need to add

– plus various documents, excerpts, summaries, how-to’s& guides to books –

Increasingly frequent happenings over the past two decades have necessitated changes, many of them fundamental, in various facets of navigation and tracking. Participants throughout all walks (industry, academia, professional engineering societies, Department of Defense, …) are involved. Also as anticipated, new problems suddenly emerge and further complicate efforts to keep pace. This site offers steps toward solutions applicable for widespread operation.

Changes advocated are far-reaching, covering a scope that has broadened with further additions here. Some of the proposed methods have been known for years. Others are relatively new and, though successfully used and verified, are known to only a minority. I provide 1 page summaries for some and short blogs for several more. They are also thoroughly documented, along with flight-test validation results, complete with algorithmic formulations that originated with me (my 2007 book). 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 continue 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
  

Innovations / Advocacy:

• Read my InsideGNSS Collision Avoidance article 
  
• 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
  
• Earlier InsideGNSS Article – click here Get a Start on GNSS Interoperability Now; Mar/Apr, 2013 
  
• An Unmanned Systems publication – Collision Avoidance by Speed Change