An assistant professor of engineering at the University of California, Riverside has received a three-year, $447,000 grant to develop techniques to navigate areas where GPS doesn’t work, such as indoors, underwater and in space.

The work by Anastasios Mourikis, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the Bourns College of Engineering, can be used for navigation indoors by visually impaired people or emergency responders in a burning building or collapsed mine and for small-scale drone surveillance by law enforcement and military personal.

“This is a building block,” Mourikis said. “It can be used for many, many tasks.”

In recent years, navigation without GPS on large-scale systems, such as autonomous ground vehicles, has been extensively studied in the robotics research community and strong solutions have been developed. However, those solutions typically require large and costly computers and sensors, and use a lot of battery power.

The problem at the moment is that these algorithms can’t be used on a small-scale device, such as a cell phone, in part because if those algorithms were put on a cell phone they would drain the battery in a very quickly.

Mourikis aims to change that.

He plans to focus on cell phones because they are so common and also, for the most part, have a camera, which can be used for finding one’s location when GPS is not available.

Mourikis will develop algorithms that will that optimally use the phone’s inexpensive cameras, computing power, and limited battery life. At the end of the three-year grant, Mourikis hopes to have a cell phone app that can provide accurate position information in areas where GPS is not available, such as indoors.

He plans to implement the algorithms using open-source software that will be made available on the Internet for users to install. This will allow the power of “crowd-sourcing” to test the methods in a large number of situations and accelerate wider adoption of the developed technology.

The software will also be instrumental for connecting with K-12 students at local outreach events. Mourikis will collaborate with the Bourns College of Engineering’s Mathematics, Engineering and Science Achievement (MESA) program, a science and engineering outreach program that serves 19 area schools and works with hundreds of educationally disadvantaged students to help excel in science, technology, engineering and mathematics classes.