Greenspan Wins IEEE/ION PLANS Kershner Award

The IEEE/ION Positioning, Location and Navigation Symposium (PLANS) 2012 Executive Committee presented its Richard B. Kershner Award to Dr. Richard Greenspan at the IEEE/ION PLANS 2012 Conference on Thursday, 26 April 2012 in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, USA. Dr. Greenspan was recognised for his pioneering work in the integration of GPS receivers with inertial navigation systems and the development and perfection of carrier-phase GPS interferometry for the high-precision measurement of fixed and moving baselines with applications to relative and differential ranging that cover the alphabet from Agriculture to Zoogeograph.

Dr. Greenspan has been a member of the technical staff of The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory since 1978 where he has held both high-level management and technical positions. He currently holds the highest rank on Draper’s engineering ladder, where he is the technical lead on several initiatives to improve the situational awareness of our warfighters and reduce any “collateral damage” from their actions. These activities rely on the creative uses of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that exploit Global Navigation Satellite Systems when they are available and other means when SATNAV is not fully available. U.S. warfighters are greatly benefiting from Dr. Greenspan’s sustained contributions to the art and science of satellite navigation that is highly integrated with other sensors.

Dr. Greenspan has lectured worldwide on “Innovative Applications of Satellite Navigation” under sponsorship by the Advisory Group for Aerospace Research and Development of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. He is a Fellow and a Past President of ION. He is also an Associate Fellow of the AIAA, a lifetime member of the IEEE, and a member of the AGU. He has been an associate editor of NAVIGATION: Journal of the Institute of Navigation since 1992 and has been consulting editor on navigation for McGraw-Hill’s Encyclopedia of Science and Technology since 1998. He holds several patents in the area of satellite navigation technology, has published many excellent and often referenced technical papers and was the invited author of the “GPS and Inertial Integration” chapter in the classic AIAA book Global Positioning System: Theory and Applications, Volume I”.  He received his BS (1960), MS (1962) and PhD (1968) in electrical engineering from MIT, all with high honours.

The Kershner Award is granted in recognition for substantial contribution to the technology of navigation and positioning equipment, systems or practices over their lifetime and is given in memory of Dr. Richard B. Kershner who participated in the initial conception and led the development of Transit, the world's first navigation satellite system.