Drone Navigation Companies Seek New Ways Past Warzone Jamming

A drone operator corrects a fire of mortar on a drone to fire toward Russian position in the Donetsk region.

GPS spoofing and other countermeasures meant to knock drones from the skies over battlefields are giving rise to novel navigation systems that will work even in the face of intense jamming.

Australian guidance company Q-CTRL uses quantum measurements of the earth’s magnetic and gravitational fields to keep uncrewed systems on course in jammed or otherwise GPS-denied environments. ASIO, an Israeli company, navigates with onboard cameras and image processing.

Although GPS remains the gold standard, having other systems that can get near a target is sufficient in many situations. Most systems will also combine several guidance methods.

“The technology is not a replacement for GPS,” Charlie Burnard, Q-CTRL’s global head of government engagement, said at the Farnborough International Airshow near London this week. “It is a reliable, resilient backup for environments where GPS or even other navigation modalities just don’t operate.”

In Ukraine radio signals can be drowned out, separating drones from their human controllers. GPS guidance, too, is jammable without proper encryption — which led US-made Excalibur artillery shells to fall out of favor after initial successes.

Even fiber-optic control wires have been largely rendered obsolete by simple countermeasures such as entangling lines strung across fields to snag the cables after they pass overhead.

Any sort of alternative guidance system, and GPS itself, is also paired with an inertial guidance system that takes reading on velocity and other movements to determine where the drone is relative to where it started. Inertial guidance on its own, however, falls victim to drift, as any small measurement errors become magnified over time.

ANELLO Photonics, a US-based company, has developed a fiber-optic laser gyro with no moving parts, about the size of a matchbook.

“The idea is that each of those different modalities has strengths and weaknesses in different environments,” Walter Stockwell, ANELLO Photonics’ vice president for aerial solutions., said at Farnborough. “Ours works all the time.”

Ukraine is in the midst of a massive deep-strike campaign using long-range drones, hitting targets in Russia that were previously out of reach.

Kyiv’s attacks against oil refineries in particular have forced Russia to export more crude that can’t be processed at home, raising shipments to the highest level since the start of the war. Ukraine is also intensifying strikes on tankers in both the Black and Azov Seas.