2024 Per Enge Early Achievement Award

Presented to: Dr. Jason Gross

Citation: For the development and demonstration of resilient navigation system algorithms and methods in  degraded GNSS environments

2024 Early Achievement Award - Dr. Jason Gross

Dr. Jason N. Gross and his students developed and demonstrated navigation systems aided by coordination among agents in heterogeneous multi-agent teams. The work fuses measurements from a combination of sensors (carrier-phase differential GNSS, inertial sensing, and peer-to-peer ranging radios) to achieve both relative and absolute navigation much more robustly than any agent could manage on its own.

Dr. Gross and his students developed and demonstrated robust factor graph methods for GNSS-degraded applications, which have since become widely used in GNSS.

Additionally, Dr. Gross demonstrated and improved effective receiver autonomous GNSS spoofing detection technologies. The work prompted Dr. Gross’ winning a “Big 12” faculty fellowship, to work with Dr. Todd Humphreys at the UT Austin Radionavigation Lab in 2015; and remains one of the simplest and best post-correlation techniques for GNSS spoofing detection.

Dr. Gross is professor and chair of the Department of Mechanical, Materials and Aerospace Engineering at West Virginia University (WVU) where his research focuses on robotics systems and uncrewed aerial systems with an emphasis on perception and localization. He directs the WVU Navigation Lab, is a coordinator of WVU’s growing robotics program, and was team lead for WVU’s Space Robotics Challenge 2 team. He is past recipient of an NGA New Investigator Program grant; AFOSR Faculty Fellowship; WVU Big XII Faculty Fellowship; and WVU Statler College outstanding teaching, outstanding researcher, and new researcher of the year awards. He is an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, a Senior Member of the IEEE, and a member of the ION. Dr. Gross received his PhD in Aerospace Engineering from WVU in 2011.