James Brodovsky

James Brodovsky

Navigation and estimation engineer. GNSS-denied PNT, inertial navigation, and sensor fusion.

About me

I’m James Brodovsky, a navigation and estimation engineer. I work on inertial navigation, sensor fusion, and position estimation in GNSS-denied environments — the problem of knowing where you are when satellite navigation is jammed, spoofed, blocked, or simply not there.

My work sits at the intersection of three things: strapdown inertial navigation on cheap, noisy MEMS-grade sensors; recursive Bayesian estimation, particularly particle filters and nonlinear Kalman variants; and geophysical map matching, where the Earth’s own gravity, magnetic, and bathymetric anomaly fields act as the map. The through-line is making navigation work on hardware and in environments where the textbook assumptions don’t hold.

An abbreviated CV follows. For the full picture, see publications, talks, and projects.

Education

  • Ph.D., Mechanical Engineering, Temple University — expected December 2026
    Dissertation: Robust Inertial Navigation in GNSS-Denied Environments Using MEMS Grade Sensors and Passive Geophysical Aiding. Advisor: Philip Dames.
  • M.S., Mechanical Engineering, Temple University, 2019
    Thesis: A Comparison of the Probability Hypothesis Density Filter and the Multiple Hypothesis Tracker for Tracking Targets of Multiple Types
  • B.S., Mechanical Engineering, Drexel University, 2014

Experience

  • Senior Navigation Engineer — Jan 2026 – present
    Led a ground-up rewrite of the platform’s navigation filter, replacing a legacy EKF with a modular, state-agnostic Kalman filtering library and a proper strapdown INS mechanization with tightly-coupled GNSS integration. Contributed to a clean-sheet, safety-first flight software architecture in Rust built around deterministic real-time behavior and strong module boundaries. Led research and development of magnetic and geophysical alternative-PNT algorithms for GNSS-denied operation, integrated and validated in SITL and HITL.

  • Research Associate, Boni Lab, Institute for Genomics and Evolutionary Medicine, Temple University — Dec 2024 – Dec 2025
    Built and maintained a Python HPC simulation and analysis pipeline for malaria transmission and drug-resistance modeling, used to produce calibrated scenario analyses for several African national health agencies. Standardizing the pipeline cut calibration time and made it usable by researchers who hadn’t written it.

  • Research and Development Engineer, Navigation R&D Division, Applied Research Laboratory, Pennsylvania State University — May 2019 – Nov 2024
    Researched and developed autonomous navigation for military submarines in GNSS-denied environments. Led development of a particle filter localization method using sonar and bathymetric maps, which met accuracy requirements more often than the legacy method with a 20% reduction in time-to-fix. The software is deployed on U.S. Navy submarines in an observer capacity.

  • Chief Executive Officer and Robotics Engineer, Tergeo Technologies — Jul 2021 – Sep 2023
    Co-founder. Ran business development, customer discovery, contractor management, and fundraising, and designed and prototyped the product: a ROS-based litter-sweeping robot with a custom chassis and a Mask R-CNN vision model for litter perception. The company closed for failure to reach product-market fit.

  • Research Assistant, Temple Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Temple University — Aug 2018 – May 2019

  • Mechanical Engineer, McKean Defense Group — Nov 2016 – Oct 2018
    Design and integration of shipboard hull, mechanical, and electrical system upgrades.

  • Design Engineer, Macron Dynamics — Jun 2016 – Nov 2016

  • Student Naval Aviator, Training Wing 5, United States Navy — Jun 2014 – Jul 2016
    Honorable discharge due to a reduction in force.

Teaching

  • Adjunct Teaching Professor, Robotics Engineering Department, Worcester Polytechnic Institute — Aug 2023 – present
    Developed and teach a graduate-level online asynchronous course on autonomous robotic navigation, covering basic Bayesian filtering through marine-grade inertial navigation.
  • Teaching Assistant, Mechanical Engineering Department, Temple University — Aug 2018 – May 2019

Funding and awards

  • Principal Investigator, A Machine Learning Approach to Geophysical Map-Matching Fixability — Penn State Applied Research Laboratory Internal Research and Development Grant, $50,000, Jul 2024 – Dec 2024

Technical focus

  • Navigation — strapdown INS mechanization, MEMS and tactical-grade IMU error modeling, loosely- and tightly-coupled GNSS/INS integration, geophysical map matching (gravity, magnetic, bathymetric anomaly)
  • Estimation — particle filters, extended and unscented Kalman filters, multi-target tracking (PHD filter, MHT), observability and fixability analysis
  • Software — Python and MATLAB (advanced), Rust and C++ (intermediate), ROS; numerical methods, simulation, and research tooling built to be reused rather than thrown away

Professional memberships

Institute of Navigation (ION) · IEEE · IEEE Robotics and Automation Society

Publications

Talks

Teaching activity