How can you design drones to be more resilient to GPS jamming?

Sensor fusion plays a crucial role in UAS navigation. Currently, drones integrate inertial data from IMU sensors with GPS data, providing a reliable position approximation during signal disruptions. IMU sensors provide continuous measurements of acceleration and angular velocity, aiding in tracking the drone's movement, but lack an absolute reference and suffer from drift over time. When combined with GPS data, they offer a more accurate estimation of the drone's position. To enhance this, additional sensors, such as vision sensors (cameras), capture environmental features and combine them with map data for improved localization. This compact integration of diverse sensor data fortifies UAS navigation, ensuring resilience.

Well multiple antennas can help but when flying in BVLOS range the alternatives like 5G connectivity and satellite data connectivity should be considered such as data connection with STARLINK2 or 5G/6G networks below. Relying on GPS works only well for short ranges or where radio signals are good.

CRPA’s (controlled reception pattern antennas) provide a good way to reject strong signals from terrestrial sources. I.e. it’s fairly easy to reject signals from close or below the horizon where the majority of the jamming signals come from.

RTK is indeed a method. But I suppose you.mean GNSS not GPS alone as the other obvious solution is. To use multiple constelations. Another alternative we can call semi RTK would be connection to ground stations of known coordinates that do not rely on GNSS at all just inertial navigation. It is good enough for small distances (same as RTK) and optical identifiers will make the correct location easy to match. Also using passive sensors and something like DragonOS and its multitude of RFID tools and measuring distances (from a known coordinate start) to multiple sources of emitters (including jammers) is a great way to do it. You can also use signal strength of those sources to estimate range and visual identifiers.

SDR solutions to start like the Kraken SDR kit with the 5 antenna Krakantenna accessory together now under €700. Payloads with CUAS and EW counter measures And SATCOM with frequency hopping via reserved commercial satellite channels There are a lot of good products that are light weight But it depends on the Category of Drone and it’s purpose vs the kind of EW systems they face

Actually manual fixing is a great alternative, as long as your gcs and autopilot support operators manually entering a current position, then imu’s provide a short term accuracy. The manual position can be determined from your video stream.

I have actually never thought of why someone will want to do a GPS jamming. Unless you want to somehow alter GPS information(spoofing). Regardless most systems don’t only rely on GPS. Visual navigation is a good alternative, there is sensor fusion and other forms of odometry. So GPS jamming doesn’t make much sense unless ofcourse a low cost drone design with only GPS….

The easiest way to avoid GPS jamming is not to use GPS at all. A lot of modern cruise missiles like the Tomahawk already implement this technology. The first step is to load the drone with high-resolution images of the terrain along the way to its destination. The drone will then utilize a downward facing camera to track its position along the trajectory. This is known as visual navigation. The down-side is that if the drone veers too much off-course it will no longer be able to position itself. The good thing is that no GPS is needed and such method could also be applied to navigation on bodies beyond Earth.

Just recently, we teamed up with a defence agency to test counter-UAS technology with the Honeywell Resilient Navigation suite. The UAS equipped with the ResNav suite was unaffected by GPS jamming and spoofing , however the second drone in the same trial was unprotected and drifted out of control. The hybrid solution was made up of a precision IMU, velocity radar and an anti-jamming device.

Inertial navigation, utilizing IMU sensors, proves effective in countering jamming challenges. IMU sensors provide real-time feedback on drone motion and orientation, offering a dependable alternative to GPS. Furthermore, employing sensor fusion becomes crucial in this scenario. Sensor fusion integrates data from GPS and IMU sensors using techniques like Kalman filters, correcting errors and uncertainties in navigation. This combined approach ensures a more robust and jamming-resistant drone navigation system.

Exactly, there are multiple PNT and IMU solutions that enable navigation in completely GPS denied environment. This is not exactly new news.

Use SIGINT techniques to exploit SOIs and extract geolocation information to triangulate drone position. An alternative method as demonstrated in Ukraine is to exploit cellular networks to send navigation to done via installed SIM card (ET phone home) ;-)

Ultimately, this is just a combination of the other methods shown here where the algorithms are assembled in a statistical process, by machines, on a large amount of data, typically less understood by humans, and thus exposed to new surprises, but often remarkably well performing. The topic gets a lot of attention in both academia, industry R&D, marketing and media, thus a progress is happening much faster than Moore’s law. And the topic can be mixed with traditional approaches.