Position Location And Navigation (PLAN) Group

Welcome to our new web site. An archived version of our previous site (pre-December 2020) is available here.

The Position, Location And Navigation (PLAN) Group is part of the Department of Geomatics Engineering. We are dedicated to the research, development and improvement of wireless positioning and navigation technologies for outdoor and indoor use. Most of our work is encompassed in the following research areas:

Thursday, August 17, 2023

Congratulations to Satinath Debnath

Satinath Debnath successfully defended his MSc thesis, “Ultra-Wideband Trained Artificial Neural Networks for Bluetooth Proximity Detection in Small Crowded Areas” , this afternoon. Satinath joined us in September 2021, initially only virtually and then in person later in the term. He was previously an engineer at Accord Systems in India. He has been hired by CMC Electronics in Montreal and will start there after he completes his minor revisions.

Tuesday, August 8, 2023

Congratulations to Rene Manzano

Rene Manzano successfully defended his PhD thesis, “Sequential Importance Resampling Particle Filter for Ambiguity Resolution” , this morning. He will be celebrating tonight with several members of his family who are visiting for the occasion, before starting on his revisions. Rene has been hired by Hexagon Autonomy and Positioning, aka, NovAtel for a position in their corrections services group.

Friday, February 24, 2023

Smartphones may be our greatest tool for outdoor and indoor navigation

Kyle O'Keefe from University of Calgary and Richard Langley from University of New Brunswick were featured in an episode of CBC Radio Spark. 

Read More

Tuesday, November 22, 2022

Congratulations to Roberto Capua

Roberto Capua successfully defended his PhD thesis today. Roberto completed his PhD part time, beginning in 2017, under the co-supervision of Gérard Lachapelle and Kyle O'Keefe. His thesis, "Peer PPP-RTK: Toward and Affordable Real-time High Accuracy Service" will be available early next year. 

Tuesday, July 26, 2022

Congratulations to Luis Rodriguez Mendoza

Luis Rodriguez Mendoza successfully defended his MSc thesis this afternoon. Luis’ thesis “Wearable Multi-sensor Positioning Device for Rowing Technique Analysis” will be posted to the group website soon. Luis will present his results at the North American Congress on Biomechanics later this month in Ottawa and has just started full time position with Hexagon in Calgary.

Tuesday, July 26, 2022

Congratulations to Kelly Harke

Kelly Harke who successfully defended her MSc thesis this morning. Kelly’s thesis “Kayak-specific Motion Constraints for an Improved Android Smartphone GPS/INS Navigation Solution” will be posted on the group website soon. She will also be presenting this work at ION GNSS+ virtually in Session D1 in September.

Tuesday, November 30, 2021

Luis Rodriguez featured in MagPi Magazine

MSc. student Luis Rodriguez' class project to classify beverages by smell was featured in MagPi Magazine. https://magpi.raspberrypi.com/articles/electronic-nose

Thursday, August 26, 2021

Congratulations to Paul Gratton

Paul Gratton successfully defended his MSc. thesis “Evaluation of Kinematic GNSS PPP for Tropospheric Zenith Wet Delay Estimation in Mountainous Regions” this afternoon on Zoom. Paul impressed the committee and achieved the very rare “no revisions” decision so now he will have to work quickly to submit his final version by the end of next week.

Friday, August 20, 2021

Congratulations to Ehab Ghanem

Ehab Ghanem successfully defended his PhD thesis “Relative Position and Attitude Determination using Multiple UWB Ranges” today at UBC Okanagan in Kelowna. Ehab was partially sponsored by the NSERC Multi-Sensor-Systems CREATE project and visited Calgary for two major data collection campaigns, most recently in the Summer of 2019. Ehab’s thesis will be posted to the new PLAN group webpage and the UBC repository as soon as he completes his revisions.

Thursday, April 29, 2021

Andreas Brown Student Wins Swiss Graduate Scholarship

Andreas Brown has won the highly competitive Excellence Scholarship and Opportunity Programme (ESOP) award, offered by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich (ETH Zürich). Andreas joined the Geomatics program in 2018. In 2019 he was an NSERC undergraduate research assistant in the PLAN group, where he investigated ultra-wideband technology for athletic applications in water. Andreas will complete his Bachelor of Science in Geomatics Engineering in April 2021 and plans to move to Switzerland later this summer.

Agarwal, N., & O’Keefe, K. (2023). Use of GNSS Doppler for Prediction in Kalman Filtering for Smartphone Positioning. IEEE Journal of Indoor and Seamless Positioning and Navigation, 151–160. [Publisher Link]

Agarwal, N., O’Keefe, K., & Klukas, R. (2023). Alternative Approach to Integrate GNSS Doppler in Kalman Filter for Smartphone Positioning. 2023 13th International Conference on Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation (IPIN), 1–6. [Publisher Link]

Blois, M., Studenny, J., O’Keefe, K., & Liu, B. (2023). Baseline Spoofing Detection for Aircraft with Standard Navigation Hardware. Proceedings of the 36th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2023), 824–835. [Publisher Link]

Debnath, S., & O’Keefe, K. (2023). Proximity Estimation with BLE RSSI and UWB Range Using Machine Learning Algorithm. 2023 13th International Conference on Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation (IPIN), 1–6. [Publisher Link]

Manzano-Islas, R., & O’Keefe, K. (2023). Map-Aided Particle Filter for Improved Multi-hypothesis Ambiguity Resolution. Proceedings of the 36th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2023), 2774–2787. [Publisher Link]

Naghdi, S., and O’Keefe K.. (2022). “Combining Multichannel RSSI and Vision with Artificial Neural Networks to Improve BLE Trilateration.” Sensors, 22 (12): 4320. [Publisher Link]

Rodrigues Mendoza, L., and O’Keefe, K. (2021). “Periodic Extended Kalman Filter to Estimate Rowing Motion Indoors Using a Wearable Ultra-Wideband Ranging Positioning System.” 2021 International Conference on Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation (IPIN), Lloret de Mar, Spain, 1–8. [Publisher Link]

Zwetsloot, R. (2021). “Electronic nose.” The MagPi magazine, (111), 18–21. [Publisher Link]

Manzano-Islas, R., and O’Keefe, K. (2021). “SIR Particle Filter in Float Solution for Ambiguity Resolution.” Proceedings of the 34th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2021), 2493–2506. [Publisher Link]

Capua, R., and O’Keefe, K. (2021). “Performance of a Collaborative Peer PPP-RTK with Ionospheric and Tropospheric Estimation Exchanges for Short-range Networks of Selfdriving Users.” Proceedings of the 34th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2021), 753–771. [Publisher Link]

Gratton, P. (2021). "Evaluation of Kinematic GNSS PPP for Tropospheric Zenith Wet Delay Estimation in Mountainous Regions" Department of Geomatics Engineering, University of Calgary [Download]

Gratton, P., Banville, S., Lachapelle, G., and O’Keefe, K. (2021). “Kinematic Zenith Tropospheric Delay Estimation with GNSS PPP in Mountainous Areas.” Sensors, 21(17), 5709. [Publisher Link]

Monsur, M. (2021). "GPS/Wi-Fi integration for challenging environments using raw GNSS data". School of Engineering, University of British Columbia Okanagan. [Download]

Huang, C. (2021). "Wheel Odometry Aided Visual-Inertial Odometry in Winter Urban Environments". Department of Geomatics Engineering, University of Calgary. [Download]

Ghanem, E., O’Keefe, K., and Klukas, R. (2020). “Testing Vehicle-to-Vehicle Relative Position and Attitude Estimation using Multiple UWB Ranging.” 2020 IEEE 92nd Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC2020-Fall), 1–5. [Publisher Link]

Huang, C. , Jiang, Y. , and O'Keefe, K. (2020). “Wheel Odometry aided Visual-Inertial Odometry for Land Vehicle Navigation in Winter Urban Environments”. Proceedings of the 33rd International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2020), Institute of Navigation, St. Louis, MO, USA, 2237 - 2251. [Publisher Link]

Naghdi, S. (2020). “Improving Bluetooth-based Indoor Positioning Using Vision and Artificial Networks”. Department of Geomatics Engineering, University of Calgary, Calgary. [Download]

Lachapelle, G. (2020). “GPS Performance on Mountain Trails”. Technical Note, Department of Geomatics Engineering, University of Calgary.

Naghdi, S. , and O'Keefe, K. (2020). “Detecting and Correcting for Human Obstacles in BLE Trilateration Using Artificial Intelligence”. Sensors, MDPI, 20(5), 1350. [Publisher Link]

Click here for a complete list of publications from 1975-2019