Resilient Navigation Solution for UAVs Demonstrated

infiniDome, Honeywell, and Easy Aerial have demonstrated a new resilient navigation solution designed for UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) undertaking critical missions in GPS-challenged and denied environments.

Many UAVs, from 20 lb class-1 multicopters to 150 lb class-3 fixed-wing UAV, rely almost entirely on GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) for basic navigation, particularly for BVLOS (Beyond Visual Line Of Sight) and autonomous operations. Due to the weakness of GNSS signals, these UAVs are extremely susceptible to jamming attacks, which can be carried out from large distances using cheap jammers bought online. UAV developers or end-users currently try to solve this problem either by creating “safe landing protocols” in GNSS-challenged environments or by adding various types of sensors (e.g. LiDAR, optical, etc.) to their flight controllers which provide, only in certain scenarios, a reasonable source for navigation data. The problem is that they do not work in many situations, such as when flying too high, too low, too fast, in fog or darkness, or above the sea.

The Robust Navigation System, jointly developed by Honeywell and infiniDome, solves the aforementioned problem by tightly pairing the GNSS-based, UAV-tailored Honeywell Compact Inertial Navigation System (HCINS) with infiniDome’s GPS anti-jamming technology (GPSdome), integrated with Honeywell’s Radar-based Velocity System (HRVS). The Robust Navigation System is an all-in-one solution that can be installed on almost any UAV with a common flight controller (e.g. PixHawk), providing it with continuous, accurate navigation data in GNSS-challenged or fully GNSS-denied environments.

The main goal of the demonstration was to prove the Robust Navigation System’s ability to maintain autonomous navigation for multicopters under different GPS/GNSS jamming scenarios. The demo was attended by Israeli defense primes, drone manufacturers, and government end-users, and was performed at a test range in the center of Israel where two military-grade directional jammers were used to jam the navigation system of an Easy Aerial Osprey hexacopter operating with a PixHawk 2.1 Cube Black.

The demonstration proved that a UAV protected by the Robust Navigation System, in a GPS-challenged environment (single direction of jamming) and fully denied environment (multiple directions of powerful jamming by military-grade jammers) can perform BVLOS and autonomous tasks accurately and safely without needing to assume manual control of the UAV.

In comparison, it was also shown that an unprotected drone, when attacked by the same jammers, loses position accuracy and GNSS fix within 3-5 seconds, tilts at an aggressive angle and takes off in seconds in a random direction. The only way to avoid the drone drifting kilometers away and eventually crashing is by taking manual control and visually bringing it back.

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