skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: A Proposed Framework for UAS Positioning in GPS-Denied and GPS-Spoofed Environments
Unmanned Aerial Systems have become ubiquitous and are now widely used in commercial, consumer, and military applications. Their widespread use is due to a combination of their low cost, high capability, and ability to perform tasks and go places that are not easy or safe for humans. Most UAS platforms are dependent on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), such as the Global Positioning System (GPS), to provide positioning information for navigation and flight control. Without reliable GPS signals, the flight path cannot be trusted, and flight safety cannot be assured. However, GPS is vulnerable to several types of malicious attacks, including jamming, spoofing, or physical attacks on the GPS constellation itself. Additionally, there are environments in which GPS reception is not always possible, a key example being urban canyon areas where line-of-site to the GPS satellite constellation may be blocked or obscured by large obstacles such as buildings. Numerous methods have been proposed for position estimation in GPS denied environments. However, these methods have significant limitations and typically exhibit poor performance in certain environments and scenarios. This paper analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of existing alternate positioning methods and describes a framework where multiple positioning solutions are jointly employed to construct an optimal position estimate. The proposed framework aims to reduce computation complexity and yield good positioning performance across a wide variety of environments.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2006674
PAR ID:
10564789
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Corporate Creator(s):
Editor(s):
NA
Publisher / Repository:
IEEE
Date Published:
ISBN:
979-8-3503-9309-5
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1 to 9
Format(s):
Medium: X
Location:
Herndon, VA, USA
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) heavily depend on the Global Positioning System (GPS) for navigation. However, the unencrypted civilian GPS signals are subject to different types of threats, including GPS spoofing attacks. In this paper, we evaluate five instance-based learning models for GPS spoofing detection in UAS, namely K Nearest Neighbor, Radius Neighbor, Linear Support Vector Machine (SVM), C-SVM, and Nu-SVM. We used software-defined radio units to collect and extract features from satellite signals. Then, we simulated three types of GPS spoofing attacks specifically the simplistic, intermediate, and sophisticated attacks. The evaluation results show that Nu-SVM outperforms the other instance learning classifiers in terms of accuracy, probability of detection, probability of false alarm, and probability of misdetection. In addition, the model shows good computational performance regarding memory usage and processing time in the detection phase. 
    more » « less
  2. Modern systems and devices, including unmanned aerial systems (UAS), autonomous vehicles, and other unmanned and autonomous systems, commonly rely on the Global Positioning System (GPS) for positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT). Cellular mobile devices rely on GPS for PNT and location-based services. Many of these systems cannot function correctly without GPS; however, GPS signals are susceptible to a wide variety of signal-related disruptions and cyberattacks. GPS threat detection and mitigation have received significant attention recently. There are many surveys and systematic reviews in the literature related to GPS security; however, many existing reviews only briefly discuss GPS security within a larger discussion of cybersecurity. Other reviews focus on niche topics related to GPS security. There are no existing comprehensive reviews of GPS security issues in the literature. This paper fills that gap by providing a comprehensive treatment of GPS security, with an emphasis on UAS applications. This paper provides an overview of the threats to GPS and the state-of-the-art techniques for attack detection and countermeasures. Detection and mitigation approaches are categorized, and the strengths and weaknesses of existing approaches are identified. This paper also provides a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art on alternative positioning and navigation techniques in GPS-disrupted environments, discussing the strengths and weaknesses of existing approaches. Finally, this paper identifies gaps in existing research and future research directions. 
    more » « less
  3. Agaian, Sos S.; DelMarco, Stephen P.; Asari, Vijayan K. (Ed.)
    High accuracy localization and user positioning tracking is critical in improving the quality of augmented reality environments. The biggest challenge facing developers is localizing the user based on visible surroundings. Current solutions rely on the Global Positioning System (GPS) for tracking and orientation. However, GPS receivers have an accuracy of about 10 to 30 meters, which is not accurate enough for augmented reality, which needs precision measured in millimeters or smaller. This paper describes the development and demonstration of a head-worn augmented reality (AR) based vision-aid indoor navigation system, which localizes the user without relying on a GPS signal. Commercially available augmented reality head-set allows individuals to capture the field of vision using the front-facing camera in a real-time manner. Utilizing captured image features as navigation-related landmarks allow localizing the user in the absence of a GPS signal. The proposed method involves three steps: a detailed front-scene camera data is collected and generated for landmark recognition; detecting and locating an individual’s current position using feature matching, and display arrows to indicate areas that require more data collects if needed. Computer simulations indicate that the proposed augmented reality-based vision-aid indoor navigation system can provide precise simultaneous localization and mapping in a GPS-denied environment. Keywords: Augmented-reality, navigation, GPS, HoloLens, vision, positioning system, localization 
    more » « less
  4. With the increasing use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in military and civilian applications, the security of this technology has become one of the critical concerns. UAVs’ positioning and navigation activities are highly dependent on Global Positioning Systems as they provide accurate locations for these vehicles. However, due to the civilian GPS signals being open and unencrypted, malicious users can target them in multiple ways, including by launching Global Positioning System spoofing attacks. To address this security issue, numerous techniques have been proposed to detect and classify these attacks, including supervised machine learning techniques. However, no studies have focused on unsupervised models to detect these attacks. In this paper, we compare the performance of several supervised models with that of unsupervised models in terms of accuracy, probability of detection, probability of misdetection, probability of false alarm, processing time, training time, prediction time, and memory size. The supervised models are Gaussian Naïve Bayes, Classification and Regression Decision Tree, Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Linear-Support Vector Machine, and Artificial Neural Network. The unsupervised models are Principal Component Analysis, K-means clustering, and Autoencoder. The results show that the Classification and Regression Decision Tree model outperforms the other supervised and unsupervised models in detecting and classifying GPS spoofing attacks. 
    more » « less
  5. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles have been widely used in military and civilian areas. The positioning and return-to-home tasks of UAVs deliberately depend on Global Positioning Systems (GPS). However, the civilian GPS signals are not encrypted, which can motivate numerous cyber-attacks on UAVs, including Global Positioning System spoofing attacks. In these spoofing attacks, a malicious user transmits counterfeit GPS signals. Numerous studies have proposed techniques to detect these attacks. However, these techniques have some limitations, including low probability of detection, high probability of misdetection, and high probability of false alarm. In this paper, we investigate and compare the performances of three ensemble-based machine learning techniques, namely bagging, stacking, and boosting, in detecting GPS attacks. The evaluation metrics are the accuracy, probability of detection, probability of misdetection, probability of false alarm, memory size, processing time, and prediction time per sample. The results show that the stacking model has the best performance compared to the two other ensemble models in terms of all the considered evaluation metrics. 
    more » « less