With ambitions of designing technologies that help overcome the challenges faced by UAS and remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS), UAV Navigation is helping research and develop innovative and cutting-edge flight control technologies that address what the company describes as the “need of the hour.”

UAV Navigation’s Research and Development Project, Visual Navigation System (VNS), largely reduces the accumulated positional error during Dead-Reckoning Navigation. 

UAV Navigation describes the initial testing in real-time flight conditions as a “complete success,” which indicates that VNS is ideally suited for UAV Navigation’s flight control platform that improves navigation without GNSS signal. 

Leveraging “Visual Odometry” techniques, the VNS determines the position and orientation of the aircraft, which is done through a camera that is installed under it and captures images that are then analyzed and processed.

UAV Navigation notes that GNSS receivers are commonly used to provide positional information, which also helps to cancel out the inherent drift of MEMs-based inertial sensors.

Tolerant towards GNSS failures (typically, in GNSS-denied scenarios), UAV Navigation’s sensors can operate in Dead-Reckoning without compromising on flight safety. A prolonged GNSS failure can lead to a significant navigation drift, though, which is where the VNS comes in. A lightweight Onboard Computer processes the images from the camera, and translates them into a relative change in the aircraft position. This information can be combined with the inertial sensors to reduce the overall drift down to less than one percent of the distance traveled, which eliminates any drift associated with time.

The VNS system is made up of a standard VECTOR autopilot, a simple, belly-mounted camera and a small, lightweight image processing computer.  

UAV Navigation says that it has carved out a niche for itself by enabling safer and more accurate operations with VNS in GNSS-denied environments.