The battlefield is saturated with GPS jammers. Without navigation, drones fall, miss, or return early. Every jammed drone is a failed mission and a lost asset.
Russia deploys EW systems that suppress GPS across ~100 km. A drone loses positional awareness instantly — no fallback, mission aborted.
Without GPS correction, inertial nav accumulates error. Over a 200 km flight, uncorrected IMU drift can exceed 10 km — missed target, wasted strike.
Naval drones operate in GPS-denied environments. When signal is lost, there is no way home — the vessel must be destroyed before it falls into enemy hands.
Over open sea there are no landmarks. Optical flow, visual SLAM, and terrain matching all fail — leaving USVs with no alternative to GPS.
Recovery in contested waters is impossible. Operators trigger self-destruct to prevent capture. Each loss burns $300k+, a critical asset and mission budget.
| Solution | Works over ocean | Works at night | Passive (no RF) | Low cost | Lightweight |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Map matching | ✕ Needs terrain | ~ IR only | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| INS (Inertial Nav) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✕ Very expensive | ✕ Heavy |
| Optical flow | ✕ Needs texture | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Visual SLAM | ✕ Needs features | ✕ | ✓ | ~ | ✓ |
| FNAV ★ | ✓ Stars + sky | ✓ Star tracker | ✓ Zero RF | ✓ ~€160 | ✓ ~100g |
Passive. Unjammable. Works day and night, over ocean and terrain.