TL;DR
GPS jamming in Ukraine is driving demand for alternative drone navigation. Q-CTRL (quantum), ASIO (vision), and ANELLO (laser gyro) showed solutions at Farnborough.
GPS jamming in Ukraine is driving demand for alternative drone navigation. Q-CTRL (quantum), ASIO (vision), and ANELLO (laser gyro) showed solutions at Farnborough.
GPS spoofing and jamming have become standard countermeasures on the battlefield in Ukraine, separating drones from their operators and rendering some guided munitions useless. US-made Excalibur artillery shells fell out of favour after initial successes because their GPS guidance was jammable. Even fibre-optic control wires have been countered by entangling lines strung across fields. The result is a rush of companies building navigation systems that work when GPS does not.
Three showed their solutions at the Farnborough International Airshow this week. Australian company Q-CTRL uses quantum measurements of the earth’s magnetic and gravitational fields to keep drones on course in GPS-denied environments. “The technology is not a replacement for GPS,” said Charlie Burnard, Q-CTRL’s global head of government engagement. “It is a reliable, resilient backup for environments where GPS or even other navigation modalities just don’t operate.” Israeli company ASIO navigates using onboard cameras and image processing. US-based ANELLO Photonics has built a fibre-optic laser gyroscope with no moving parts, about the size of a matchbook.
Most systems combine several guidance methods. All are paired with inertial navigation, which measures velocity and movement relative to a starting point, but inertial guidance alone drifts over time as small errors compound. The new technologies aim to correct that drift without relying on any external signal that an adversary can jam. Ukrainian drone company Sine built a satellite-free navigation system using time-of-flight methods to dodge Russian electronic warfare, and the UK completed the world’s first quantum navigation flights earlier this year.
Ukraine’s deep-strike drone campaign makes the problem urgent at scale. Kyiv is hitting targets in Russia that were previously out of reach, including oil refineries whose destruction has forced Russia to export unprocessed crude at the highest levels since the war began. Long-range drones flying hundreds of kilometres through contested electromagnetic environments need navigation that survives the entire route. Getting “near a target” is sufficient for many missions, but the margin between near and miss is what these companies are selling.
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