Before humans could write, they could navigate. The Polynesians crossed thousands of kilometres of open Pacific using wave patterns and the positions of birds. The seafaring Greeks were guided by the stars. The Vikings used sunstones to find the sun through cloud cover. Then came the tools. The magnetic compass transformed maritime trade and opened the Age of Sail. A British naval disaster in 1707 led to the invention of the chronometer, solving the longitude problem by keeping precise time at sea. Every civilisation that explored beyond its own borders had to first solve the problem of knowing where it was.
These were incredible innovations in their own right, but the world is full of edge cases. Celestial navigation worked until it was cloudy. Magnetic compasses worked until you sailed near iron deposits, or the poles shifted. Radio navigation worked until someone jammed the signal. Each breakthrough had its limitations.
Against this backdrop, the Global Positioning System (GPS) felt like the final frontier. A constellation of satellites, global coverage, centimetre-level precision, free to use. GPS underpins modern life in ways most people never think about. GPS underpins modern life in ways most people never think about. It guides transportation from commercial aviation to Ubers, synchronises the power grid, and enables systems from centimetre-accurate seed planting to autonomous haul trucks moving ore across mine sites. It is the invisible backbone of a remarkable amount of modern economic activity. But like its predecessors, GPS is fallible.
GPS signals are weak by the time they reach Earth – weak enough that a device purchased online for a few dollars can overwhelm them. In 2024, GPS spoofing incidents in aviation increased roughly 50x compared to the prior year. At peak, there were up to 700 daily jamming and spoofing events globally. Eighty-five per cent of flights over Estonia were affected by interference. Poland recorded nearly 3,000 cases in a single month. And beyond deliberate jamming, GPS simply doesn't work in many environments that matter: underground, underwater, inside tunnels, under bridges, in dense urban environments.
None of this is to say that GPS has gone the way of the sunstones, but there is a growing set of use cases where "usually works" isn't good enough, and navigation assurance is a prerequisite. Defence systems operating in contested electromagnetic environments and without crew members to fall back on. Autonomous vehicles that can't pull over and wait for a better signal. Mining equipment operating hundreds of metres below the surface. Submarines that may not surface for weeks. In these contexts, you need navigation that works independently of any external signal, all the time, without exception.
There’s a beautifully simple idea to solve for this. If you know where you started, and you can precisely measure every acceleration and rotation since that point, you can calculate where you are now. No external reference needed. Just physics. Where we were and where we’ve been tells us where we are.
This is inertial navigation. The concept dates back to the German V-2 programme in the 1940s, and its theoretical foundations go further, to Euler and Newton. The engineering challenge has always been precision. Every tiny measurement error compounds over time. For example a gyroscope that drifts by a fraction of a degree per hour will, after enough hours, have you believing you're in a different country. The history of inertial navigation is the history of making that drift smaller and slower: first through better hardware, and now through software that can extract remarkable accuracy from relatively simple sensors.
For decades, this was a relatively niche concern. But GPS has become less reliable across a rapidly expanding set of environments, and there is an accelerating wave of autonomous systems that need to navigate precisely and can't carry a human as a fallback.
Advanced Navigation's core product is an inertial navigation system (INS) – a device that combines accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers, and pressure sensors to continuously measure an object's motion and orientation in three dimensions. What makes the system powerful is the intelligence layer on top: Advanced Navigation's proprietary AI-based algorithms that extract maximum navigational accuracy from relatively commoditised hardware components. These algorithms, built on Xavier’s (co-founder) early university research in this space, fuse the inertial data with whatever external signals are available, including satellite positioning (when available), LiDAR, barometric data, Doppler velocity logs, and other inputs, to produce a unified, high-accuracy picture of position, velocity, and heading. When GPS is present, the system uses it. When GPS is denied, the system falls back on its own sensors, without interruption. Sitting above all of this is Advanced Navigation’s OS, a software platform that manages hardware deployment, mission planning, and real-time data interpretation across the full product range.
The hardware world revolves around SWaP-C – the tradeoffs engineers have to make around size, weight, power, and cost. Advanced Navigation’s software-heavy approach gives them best-in-class performance while delivering engineers market-leading SWaP-C results. Crucially, it also means AdNav can push software updates to products already deployed in the field, matching the compressed innovation cycles that modern defence demands. The conflict in Ukraine highlighted how feedback loops between the front line and the factory have shortened from years to weeks. Hardware that can't be updated in the field is hardware that falls behind.
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Fibre-optic gyroscope (FOG): One of the key sensors Advanced Navigation assembles in its INSs.
Two beams of light travel in opposite directions through a coil of optical fibre. When the device rotates, one beam's path is slightly longer than the other's, creating a measurable difference in arrival time at the receiver. This phase shift is directly proportional to the rate of rotation.
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The shift toward autonomous and uncrewed platforms is one of the most significant technology trends of this decade. It’s not just Waymos and Teslas around the streets of San Francisco, the shift to autonomy is happening across defence, mining and logistics. In many cases, it's driven by cost and operational necessity. In defence, there's an added imperative: reducing the loss of lives in conflict.