"Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) services underpin critical infrastructure, transportation systems, communication networks, defence operations, and increasingly autonomous systems. However, the growing reliance on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) has exposed significant vulnerabilities arising from interference, spoofing, cyber-attacks and environmental disruptions. Ensuring resilient PNT has therefore emerged as a national priority, requiring systems capable of maintaining trusted performance when traditional satellite-based services are degraded or unavailable.
In response to this challenge, the SHIELD Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) initiative has been proposed as a national effort to develop sovereign, trusted and resilient PNT capability for Australia. SHIELD brings together industry, government and research organisations to advance technologies that can detect, mitigate and operate through PNT disruptions. Central to this vision is the recognition that no single technology can provide resilience in all operating environments. Instead, sensor fusion has emerged as a widely acknowledged solution, combining information from complementary sensing modalities to provide robust and assured navigation performance under degraded conditions.
In this talk we will discuss three research activities that contribute to the development of resilient sensor-fusion-based PNT systems. The first investigates optimal estimation architectures for multi-sensor integration, evaluating the performance of alternative filtering and estimation approaches across dynamic and contested environments. The second explores magnetometry as a sensing modality capable of providing navigation information independent of external signals, with the potential to enhance resilience through environmental signature matching and magnetic field measurements. The third examines adaptive sensor scheduling strategies that intelligently manage sensing resources, balancing accuracy, power consumption and computational requirements while maintaining navigation performance during periods of sensor degradation or uncertainty."
