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UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON is an educational and research community of around 24,500 staff and students. It was founded in 1826 and has a long history of excellence in research, with eighteen Nobel prize winners and currently with the highest research income of any UK University. The Department of Geomatic Engineering is in the Faculty of Engineering Sciences and currently consists of nine academic staff, about ten externally funded research workers and fifteen PhD students.

Apart from GNSS the main research areas are Geographic Information Systems (GIS), industrial metrology and remote sensing. 

The department specialises in modelling and algorithm development.
It recently produced a high precision terrain model for the British Isles
from ERS SAR data (for the UK government), a new geoid for the British Isles
(for UK and Eire Ordnance Surveys), and it is currently leading a very high profile cloud mapping project and operating three Knowledge Transfer Partnerships with UK industry.

A major theme of the GIS work is web delivery of GI and relational databases for 3-D GIS, currently working under contract with DTI, Laser Scan and Intelligent Space. The department has a strong track record of delivery on EU-funded projects.

It coordinated two FP4 projects (CLOUDMAP and SING), one FP5 project (CLOUDMAP2), and is a major participant in an FP6-STREP project (OPTAG).

The department’s GPS, Geodesy and Navigation research group currently consists of four staff and six PhD students. The group has interests and expertise in all aspects of GPS (and more generally GNSS) positioning and applications. Recently completed projects include a major study on GPS attitude determination for small spacecraft and the re-writing of GPS survey procedures for Eurocontrol.

Members of the group also carry out consultancy and recent clients include The Ordnance Survey, Exxon-Mobil.

The Singapore Land Authority and The UK Hydrographic Office. The department’s main active GNSS projects at present are as follows. COMET: The Centre for the Observation and Modelling of Earthquakes and Tectonics is a Centre of Excellence in Earth Observation. It has three partners (UCL and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge) and is funded by NERC for five years.

Its aim is to use data from space to understand the tectonics of continental deformation and the department’s main GNSS-related roles include orbit modelling and water vapour modelling. The department is also involved in precise terrain measurement using space photogrammetry.

GNSS orbits: This is a three-year EPSRC-funded project which seeks to improve the real-time prediction of the positions of GNSS satellites in order to improve positioning accuracy and integrity. The department’s work concentrates on modelling forces due to solar radiation and anisotropic thermal re-radiation. Seamless positioning: A three-year project (jointly funded by NSL and EPSRC) has just begun that will look at the performance of high-sensitivity GNSS receivers indoors and in other environments in which GNSS signals are difficult to acquire.

GNSS multipath mitigation: The department has almost finished a three-year project funded by Leica Geosystems on the mitigation of GNSS phase multipath in both static and kinematic environments. A new method has been found to combine several multipath indicators in order to reduce multipath errors by up to 50%.

The UCL team has considerable experience of the development and application of reliability mechanisms for surveying and navigation applications. Professor Cross led a contract to develop standards and operating guidelines for the use of GPS in the UK offshore community.

The methods for ensuring the reliability of positioning data have recently been adopted in the baseline design for user terminals within the Galilei study. More recently, UCL , along with Imperial College London (under the banner of the LCGR - London Centre for GNSS Research) contributed to the assessment of RAIM performance using future GNSS constellations and the development of new GNSS integrity concepts for Galileo
as part of the GALA study.