GPS innovation wins DOT wireless competition

Professors Kannan Ramachandran and Raja Sengupta's groups at UC Berkeley win national competition seeking ideas for using wireless technology to enable vehicles to communicate with each other.

The US Department of Transportation’s (DOT’s) Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA) announced six winners of a national competition seeking ideas for using wireless technology to enable vehicles to communicate with each other. The winning ideas may be incorporated into ongoing research on using technology to improve vehicle safety and transportation operations.

Entries in the Connected Vehicle Technology Challenge had to be based on an innovative use for dedicated short-range communications (DSRC), a wireless technology similar to WiFi. A DOT panel selected five entries, while the sixth winning entry received the most votes from registrants on the competition website.

The researchers won for their project:
Venkatesan Ekambaram, Kannan Ramchandran and Raja Sengupta, University of California Berkeley, Robust GPS: Enhancing Accuracy and Security Using DSRC. Using DSRC signals on board vehicles to improve weakened positioning information and to correct illegally “jammed” Global Positioning System (GPS) signals. This enables DSRC-equipped vehicles to automatically correct the GPS positioning of other similarly equipped vehicles. Other winning entries are online here.