If GPS goes down, could aircraft navigate by comparing what they sense around them to detailed three-dimensional maps? A major satellite imagery company believes so.
Maxar’s nascent Pinpoint tool will use a drone’s video feed to infer its surroundings in 3D, then match that to maps built with the company’s P3DR, for Precision 3D Registration, said chief product officer Peter Wilczynski.
While most mapping technology is “focused on flat representations of the world,” Wilczynski said, Pinpoint will answer “how do you use that three-dimensional representation to help drones navigate, to help planes navigate, to help understand when you get a video feed from a drone or from an aircraft, what position is it actually looking at in the world.”
He said it could be an alternative to GPS, which can be vulnerable to enemy interference.
That’s important in part because of “all of the jamming issues we’ve seen in Ukraine,” he said. “I think what we’re going to see in the next few years is sort of a shift back from this absolute navigation system of GPS towards a much more referential navigation system, more like what happened when you were in a ship and you were looking at the stars.”
The fast-growing Maxar began developing Pinpoint after Wilczynski arrived from Palantir this summer. The company also recently hired Matt Santangelo as chief financial officer and Matt Jenkins to be its chief space systems officer.
The plan for Pinpoint is to finish several pilot programs with domestic and foreign drone makers by next summer, and then make the tech broadly available.
“We’re working with some different companies across the value chain. Some companies that manufacture the gimbals, some who manufacture the full [unmanned aerial vehicle]. There’s a bunch of different types: attritable, more expendable, some of the more enduring UAV. So we’re trying to experiment with this market,” Wilczynski said. “This market is really developing quickly now, as people sort of realize across the defense community that GPS, which we’ve relied on for so long, may not be available in the next conflict.”
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