2023 Parkinson Award

Presented to: Dr. Maoran Zhu, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Citation: For his thesis: “Inertial-Based Navigation State Estimation by Polynomial Optimization and Applications”

Dr. Maoran Zhu received his BS in Navigation Engineering from Wuhan University in 2017 and Ph.D. in Information Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2022. During his Ph.D. study, Dr. Zhu published five peer-reviewed journal articles in IEEE T-SP, IEEE T-AES and IEEE T-CST, and five conference papers, including in the Institute of Navigation conference proceedings. He has presented his work at several international conferences and has been invited to speak at several university forums as well. He has received multiple awards and honors, such as the School Scholarships, the Best Annual Paper in the Institute, and the SJTU Honorable Ph.D. Student Award.

Dr. Zhu has been interested in applying fundamental mathematical methods to the inertial-based navigation problems. He, for the first time, introduced the polynomial optimization theory into the inertial navigation community and derived a polynomial optimization-based information fusion method, which has been rated by IEEE T-SP anonymous experts as “has potentially a wide variety of applications.” This polynomial optimization-based fusion method has been successfully applied to several inertial-based navigation applications, notably the inertial/magnetic attitude estimation and GPS/INS integrated navigation, in which better accuracy and stability were achieved in challenging environments.