Budapesti Műszaki és Gazdaságtudományi Egyetem

Zak M. Kassas professzor előadása a BME-n, 2025. március 28. péntek, 11.00 óra

Helyszín: IB 023

Regisztráció: https://forms.office.com/e/qDv3HTfwYk

Zak M. Kassas, Ph.D. , Director, US Dept. of Transportation Center for Automated Vehicles Research with Multimodal AssurEd Navigation (CARMEN) , TRC Endowed Chair in Intelligent Transportation Systems, Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering , The Ohio State University 

Title: Resilient and accurate navigation of highly automated vehicles

Abstract:

Autonomous vehicles rely on a steady stream of signals and information from external sources for localization, route planning, perception, and situational awareness. This includes reliance on positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) information from global navigation satellite systems (GNSS). Current autonomous vehicles are too trusting of such PNT information and too fragile in the face of loss or attenuation of communications links. There is a global trend of increasing radio frequency interference, whether accidental or deliberate. Civil GNSS signals jamming and spoofing have evolved from a hypothetical threat to an experimentally-verified vulnerability, to an emerging public safety hazard.

This talk will present a framework for resilient and accurate autonomous navigation by exploiting ambient radio frequency signals of opportunity, which are not intended as navigation sources. This framework is termed radio simultaneous localization and mapping (radio SLAM). In radio SLAM, specialized vehicle-mounted cognitive radios draw relevant positioning and timing information from ambient signals of opportunity to build and continuously refine a spatiotemporal signal landscape map of the environment within which the vehicles simultaneously localize themselves in space and time. We will present an end-to-end approach, spanning theoretical modeling and analysis of signals of opportunity, specialized software-defined radio (SDR) design, practical navigation algorithm development, and experimental demonstration of radio SLAM on ground vehicles and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), navigating to a meter-level and submeter-level accuracy, respectively. We will also demonstrate the efficacy of radio SLAM in a real-world GPS-jammed environment and on high-altitude aircraft.

Bio:

Prof. Zak Kassas is the TRC Endowed Chair in Intelligent Transportation Systems and a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The Ohio State University (OSU). He is the Director of the Autonomous Systems Perception, Intelligence, and Navigation (ASPIN) Laboratory. He is also the Director of the U.S. Department of Transportation Center: CARMEN (Center for Automated Vehicle Research with Multimodal AssurEd Navigation), focusing on navigation resiliency and security of highly automated transportation systems.

He received from President Biden in 2025 the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers early in their careers. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the Institute of Navigation (ION), and a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Aerospace & Electronic Systems Society and the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society. He was ranked in 2024 by ScholarGPS as the top scholar in the world in the field of Navigation. He authored more than 200 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers, 12 magazine articles, 3 invited book chapters, and 24 U.S. patents. His awards include the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award, Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Program (YIP) award, Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) YIP award, IEEE Walter Fried Award, ION Samuel Burka Award, ION Col. Thomas Thurlow Award, and IEEE Harry Rowe Mimno Award. His students have won several awards, including three Best Ph.D. Dissertation awards (from IEEE, ION, OSU); two US DOT Graduate Student of the Year awards; and 35+ best paper, student paper, and paper presentation awards.

He started his academic career in 2014 at the University of California, Riverside; then was an Associate Professor at University of California, Irvine; then was very early promoted to Full Professor and joined The Ohio State University in 2022. Since starting his academic career, his research has attracted more than $27 million in competitive federal grants from ONR, NSF, AFOSR, DOT, NASA, NIST, Sandia National Laboratories, the Aerospace Corporation, among others. His research was featured in dozens of national and international media outlets (Science, BBC, Forbes, IEEE, ACM, Ars Technica, MIT Technology Review, among others) and appeared on 7 magazine covers. He has given 120+ invited presentations, keynotes, and plenaries, and served as a subject matter expert to DOD, GAO, DOT, and NSF.