| Description: | On Friday October 28th at the TUDelft Raj Thilak Rajan successfully defended his PhD thesis with the title shown in the picture. His research addresses estimating the space-time kinematics of mobile nodes. Or in other words, how to find the relative distance and velocity of a network of moving sensors or transmitters while also estimating clock offsets and drifts at each of the nodes. Raj showed that this can be done in anchorless networks, networks without a-priori information on the absolute position or time of any node. This makes the approach a very useful bootstrapping method in conditions where absolute references are not available, such as remote or inaccessible locations.
Application areas include indoor localization, underwater networks, drone swarms, and of course space-based satellite arrays. The latter topic was the focus of the ASTRON-TUDelft-UTwente OLFAR STW project, aiming at developing scalable autonomous nano satellite systems for low-frequency radio astronomy in space. Raj is the second OLFAR (ASTRON-TUDelft) PhD student graduating in this project. With the OLFAR work, together with R&D projects and studies such as DARIS, DEX, DSL, SURO etc, the community is gradually preparing technologies for a future low-frequency interferometric mission in space. The current Radboud-ASTRON-ISIS project NCLE aiming at providing a low-frequency science antenna payload for the Cahng'e 4 mission, is one of the next steps.
|
