UAV Navigation-Grupo Oesía, a Grupo Oesía company that builds guidance, navigation and control systems for unmanned aircraft, is researching how to use navigation signals borrowed from low Earth orbit (LEO) communication satellites to keep drones flying accurately when GNSS is unavailable, sUAS News reported. The project is funded through the European Space Agency's NAVISP Element 2 Programme and carried out by a consortium led by Inster-Grupo Oesía, with UAV Navigation-Grupo Oesía, CTTC and SICWAVE as partners.
The project uses "signals of opportunity" — transmissions from LEO communication satellites, particularly in the Ka-band, that were never designed for positioning — to generate positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) data. These non-cooperative signals are intended to complement traditional navigation sources in situations where GNSS signals such as GPS are degraded, denied, jammed or spoofed.
UAV Navigation-Grupo Oesía's contribution centers on integrating these LEO-derived PNT observables into its UAV autopilot, whose navigation algorithms will fuse the new data with inertial measurements, air data, GNSS when it is available, and vision-based navigation. A key piece of the approach is extracting position estimates from multibeam, electronically steered antennas built for wideband communication with emerging LEO constellations such as IRIS², which the companies say are inherently more resistant to jamming and spoofing than conventional omnidirectional GNSS antennas.
The companies frame the work around defense, security and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance applications as unmanned aircraft increasingly fly beyond-line-of-sight missions in contested airspace where navigation signals can be denied. The consortium plans to validate the approach in a flight-representative environment to demonstrate its feasibility under realistic operating conditions.