Building Navigation Resilience for Modern Aerial Platforms

By Walter Stockwell, PhD, VP Aerial Solutions at ANELLO Photonics

Aerial platforms are being asked to do more than ever before. Whether it’s uncrewed aircraft, advanced air mobility vehicles, or traditional aviation, today’s systems are expected to operate autonomously, safely, and reliably - often in environments where GPS performance can’t be taken for granted.

GNSS jamming and spoofing are becoming more common across the globe, and they’re no longer confined to isolated or extreme scenarios. For operators, this creates real challenges: loss of position confidence, degraded autonomy, increased pilot workload, and in some cases, mission failure. The reality is that GPS alone was never designed to handle intentional interference. To move forward, navigation systems need to be more resilient by design.

Rethinking Inertial Navigation with ANELLO Photonics

At ANELLO, we started with a simple question: Fiber optic gyros (FOGs) are the gold standard sensors for inertial navigation – what if we could make optical gyros smaller, lower power, and more rugged? What if we could make inertial navigation both highly accurate and practical to deploy across modern aerial platforms?

Our answer is ANELLO SiPhOG™ (Silicon Photonic Optical Gyroscope) technology. Traditional fiber-based gyroscopes rely on 20+ fiber splices and are hand-built. SiPhOG™ combines all the discrete photonic circuit elements onto one silicon chip. This shift brings significant advantages.

Because the sensing is photonic, it is inherently immune to shock, vibration, and RF interference. Because the photonic elements are incorporated directly onto a silicon chip, we eliminate almost all of the traditional failure points of FOG technology — the fiber splices. And because we now have highly accurate and stable inertial sensors, our SiPhOG™-based INS systems can continue to navigate when GNSS is jammed, spoofed, or simply poor quality.

Just as important, the silicon photonic platform gives us a clear path to scalability — delivering high-performance inertial sensing without the size, weight, power, or cost (SWaP-C) barriers that have limited broader INS adoption in the past.

ANELLO Aerial INS: Built for Real-World Flight

The newly released ANELLO Aerial INS brings this photonic technology into a system designed specifically for aerial applications. The system combines SiPhOG-based gyroscopes with precision accelerometers and advanced sensor fusion to deliver reliable position, velocity, and attitude information throughout a mission.

The ANELLO Aerial INS is designed to:

• Operate confidently in GPS-denied or degraded environments
• Integrate cleanly with existing avionics and autonomy stacks
• Meet the SWaP constraints of modern aerial systems

Rather than serving as a last-resort fallback, inertial navigation becomes a dependable foundation for operating in GPS-denied environments — providing continuous, trusted navigation even when external signals are unavailable or compromised.

Addressing Jamming and Spoofing Head-On

One of the most important roles of the ANELLO Aerial INS is helping platforms remain navigationally aware during GNSS interference events.

When GPS is jammed, the system continues to provide smooth, predictable navigation using inertial truth. When spoofing is present, inertial data provides an independent reference that can expose inconsistencies in GNSS position or timing. That capability helps prevent systems from quietly accepting false data that looks legitimate but isn’t.

As autonomy increases, this kind of cross-checking becomes critical - not just for mission success, but for safety and trust in the system as a whole.

Enabling the Next Phase of Aerial Autonomy

The future of aerial navigation is layered. GNSS remains important, but it cannot stand alone. High-performance inertial systems will play a central role in resilient PNT architectures - supporting autonomy, improving safety margins, and reducing operational risk. With the ANELLO Aerial INS, we’re bringing photonic inertial navigation into the air in a way that’s practical, scalable, and ready for real-world deployment. It’s about giving aerial platforms the confidence to keep flying - even when GPS can’t be trusted.

Walter Stockwell, PhD is Vice President of Aerial Solutions at ANELLO, where he leads the development and deployment of photonic inertial navigation systems for next-generation aerial platforms.