Lecturer
Dr Joon Wayn Cheong
- PhD (2012) from University of New South Wales Sydney
- BEng (Hons) First Class (2008) for Elec. Eng. & Telecom. from University of New South Wales Sydney
Engineering
Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications
Joon Wayn Cheong is currently a Lecturer / Senior Research Associate at the School of Electrical Engineering, University of New South Wales (UNSW). He is also the Deputy Director of Australian Center for Space Engineering Research (ACSER). He received his PhD in 2012) and BE (2008) from UNSW Sydney. He is currently involved in Univ. Sydney and UNSW Sydney's CUAVA satellite mission and was the Technical Lead for UNSW’s Cubesat mission (UNSW-EC0) and built the first two Australian Cubesats to become operational in space. His research combines GNSS, phased array and signal processing theories with application towards GNSS interference mitigation, GNSS weak signal acquisition, reflectometry-based remote sensing, embedded systems and vehicular networked-navigation.
Phone
02 9385 4526
E-mail
Location
Room 401, Level 4 Electrical Engineering Building (G17)
University of New South Wales
Sydney 2052 AUSTRALIA
- Publications
- Grants
- Awards
- Research Activities
- Teaching and Supervision
- Sole CI in UNSW Faculty ECR Grant in 2014 for "Cooperative Positioning via Multi-sensor Integration for Collaborative Intelligent Transport System (C-ITS)" amounting to A$20,000.
- Co-CI from UNSW MREII 2016 scheme titled “UNSW-EC0 Engineering Model” amounting to A$56,865
- Co-CI for 2018 “SBAS for connected vehicles: the potential road safety and efficiency gains through the use of an Australian Satellite Based Augmentation System” amounting to A$8,932. The report is part of an economic benefit report submitted to the government.
- Lead CI for UNSW Faculty Research Infrastructure Fund 2018 which was for GPS/GNSS Multi-frequency Signal Simulator (Spectracom) equipment. Awarded $106,953
- Sole CI for Universities Australia’s “Australia Germany Joint Research Cooperation Scheme 2019 - 2020” for the project “AOPA: Advancing Orbit Perturbation Analysis for a Cubesat swarm”. Awarded A$24,000. This is a competitive grant with ~1/3 success rate
- Lead CI for Defense Innovation Network (DIN) Seed Project Grant 2020 awarded A$100,000 for ''GNSS Situational Awareness at Sea''
- Awarded University International Postgraduate Award in 2008, a full scholarship for the entire duration of PhD study by UNSW.
- Awarded ION-GNSS 2011 student paper award, a best student paper award and travel scholarship by the U.S. Institute of Navigation, where only several awards were given out every year.
- Awarded Best Peer-Reviewed Paper in IGNSS 2011 by IGNSS Society Inc.
- Awarded UNSW Faculty Early Career Researcher Grant 2014
- Faculty of Engineering Staff Excellence Awards for Technical Staff in 2017 for “outstanding contribution to UNSW’s first Cubesat in space”
GNSS Reflectometry
He is currently involved in Univ. Sydney and UNSW Sydney's CUAVA satellite mission. I am also currently investigating remote sensing applications using GNSS Reflectometry. using datasets from the satellite missions of NASA CYGNSS and UK's TechDemoSat-1 TDS-1.
UNSW-EC0 Satellite Mission
Between 2014 - 2018, I led the technical aspects of UNSW’s first Australian university-built nanosatellite (Cubesat) operational in space, named UNSW-EC0. Furthermore, I have also led University of Sydney through its satellite project, named INPSIRE-2, which is a collaborative effort between UNSW and University of Sydney and ANU. It too became operational in space. Inserted into orbit on May 2017, these are the first Australian-built satellites in space in 15 years, and both UNSW-EC0 and INSPIRE-2 are the first pair of Australian-built Cubesats to function in space. Both satellites carry experiments and payloads essential to demonstrate Australia’s technical capabilities in space, such as a GPS navigation system that was fully developed in UNSW.
GNSS Interference Localisation
From 2015-present, I have been involved with GPSat Systems Pty Ltd (an Australian company in VIC) to investigate the enhancement of its GNSS interference detection and localization system. GNSS users are prone to interference produced by devices in the user’s surrounding area. These interference sources can be identified and localised by a network of dedicated sensors with phased array antennas. There are two rudimentary methods that can be used to detect and localise these interference sources: Angle of Arrival (AoA) and Time Difference of Arrival (TDoA). I was involved as a postdoctoral researcher to investigate sophisticated signal processing techniques that can be used to combine AoA and TDoA methods to enhance the accuracy and sensitivity of the GNSS interference localisation sensor network.
Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS)
During 2014-2015, I investigated the enhancement of GNSS positioning capability by exploiting inter-vehicular communication in collaboration with Thales Alenia Space (TAS), France, another demonstration of academia-industry collaboration. This is a project investigates the application of cooperative and network methods for vehicular navigation and anti-collision when using GNSS and inter-vehicular (V2V) radio-ranging systems. Both technologies suffer from multipath and Non-Line-Of-Sight (NLOS) distortions in urban environments. The project is a departure from existing work in that it proposes a system that is able to reject anomalous GNSS and V2V measurements and retain the Line-of-Sight measurements to provide more accurate positioning under such challenging radio environment.
Embedded GNSS Navigation Receiver
Between 2012-2014 I was involved in developing a prototype navigation receiver. This custom FPGA-based space-qualified prototype Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receiver, dubbed the Garada receiver, will be able to cater for the precise positioning and timing needs of the proposed formation-flying Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites that are also part of the ACSER umbrella. My core responsibility was to develop the acquisition, tracking and decoding C/C++ algorithms for the European SatNav GNSS E1 signal as an enhancement to ACSER’s pre-existing GPS-only Garada FPGA receiver. This project was the result of an industrial partnership with General Dynamics NZ, an SME in New Zealand.
Elec Eng. 4th Year UG Thesis Topics (updated 16th June 2020)
- Signal Processing for Sea State estimation using GNSS Reflectometry
- Altimetry using GNSS Reflectometry
- Open Source Space Operations
- Using Rust for GPU-accelerated GNSS signal processing
- Machine Learning Assisted Satellite Based Positioning
- Passive Geolocalisation of Wideband GNSS Jammer
- Software Defined Radio for Cubesat Ground Stations
- Multi-frequency SDR for Australian SBAS
- Software Verification Environment for Cubesats
- Near Real-time Raspberry Pi Space-based GPS Receiver
- Deep Learning Methods for Indoor Localisation
- Adding Reliability to the Cubesat Standard
- Crowdsourced GPS/GNSS Spoofer Detection