Robotics Colloquium: Guest Speaker Trevor Stephens

Title: Advancing the Autonomy of Flight through Resilient Navigation Solutions

Abstract: Autonomous flight for a wide variety of platforms is a technically challenging task. Execution of multiple technical areas between takeoff and landing is required to achieve successful flight autonomy. One specific research area of interest for our team is resilient navigation. Specifically, we focus on alternative navigation, which is navigating without the aid of GNSS signals. GNSS may be unavailable for multiple reasons, such as jamming/spoofing or being in urban canyons. Without GNSS updates, an inertial navigation filter is susceptible to drift. Our research focuses on alternative aiding sources to help bound inertial drift and provide absolute position updates to our navigation filters. These aiding sources include a wide variety of sources, including vision-aided navigation, magnetic anomaly-aided navigation, celestial-aided navigation, and more. This talk will provide an overview of these navigation modalities and will include real flight test results conducted on multiple Honeywell-operated aircraft. This talk provides an example of how research is conducted within an industry setting. 

Bio: Trevor Stephens is a Sr. Engineering Manager at Honeywell Aerospace Technologies. He leads the Navigation, Controls, & Surveillance group in Advanced & Applied Technology. Since joining Honeywell, he has worked on multiple navigation technologies across a wide variety of aerospace platforms. His expertise is in alternative navigation, which aims at providing a navigation solution in the absence of GNSS signals. Trevor has a background in robotics research and graduated from Brigham Young University with a BS in mechanical engineering, and MS and PhD degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of Minnesota. He conducted his PhD research in the Medical Devices and Robotics Lab under Dr. Timothy Kowalewski. He enjoys a wide variety of hobbies outside of work, including basketball, drumming, and playing with his four kids.