2013 Fellow

Presented to: Dr. Alan G. Evans

Citation: ION Fellow

During his career at Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division (NSWCDD), Dr. Evans was the Principal Investigator for many R&D projects sponsored by the Department of Defense, the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). His career in navigation has spanned over 30 years and he has contributed to both military and civilian applications.

Together with other NSWC personnel, Dr. Evans demonstrated the very first basic use of the GPS phase measurements to achieve high accuracy position changes. The Stanford Telecommunications receiver, capable of one-measurement-per-minute, single satellite tracking, was used to obtain centimeter-level accurate position changes as the satellites moved across the sky.

Dr. Evans' most recent contribution was reported at the 2011 Joint Navigation Conference. Current software developments were presented for a military GPS augmentation system composed of a global network to compute and provide low-latency corrected GPS ephemeris and clock state estimates to the users. As demonstrated, these developments enable very high-accuracy absolute GPS position, navigation/attitude estimation and time (PNT) on a dynamic platform using a military geodetic GPS receiver tightly-coupled with an inertial system. The network-assisted GPS substantially improves the real-time accuracy and supports additional GPS anti-jam signal processing important to military applications.

Dr. Evans has six navigation-related U.S. Patents and has authored or co-authored 64 papers (100 presentations) at national, or international, navigation and geodetic conferences; including 37 ION conferences (3 Best Presentation Awards), and seven invited papers in academic journals. He received the Defense Mapping Agency Research and Development Award in 1989 and the Navy Superior Civilian Service Award in 2007. Since retiring from the Navy in 2010, Dr. Evans has continued to support GPS Navigation research and development at the Penn State University Applied Research Laboratory.