Future of Navigation in Contested Environments

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]Respective chairman u members of the audience good afternoon one and all. All right. So this is uh Jiveish Gurumorti. I head the navigation and sensors business in Honeywell. Um this is a very relevant topic and multiple times you've heard about it and uh you know for the last uh 3 four years this has been a very important topic in the military aviation and military industry. uh you know how we solve for u you know reliable position navigation and timing in you know contested space right with pro you know with uh the jamming and spoofing and the counter measures also becoming stronger and stronger how do you continue to work on this so Honeywell um is a technology house you know we are not a platform OEM we are technology OEM we do everything nose totail in an aircraft we supply critical technologies for various land, air and marine platforms. Navigation is one of them. Uh and we are a strong navigation player in the sense u you know we are the largest manufacturers of inertial systems you know ring laser gyros fiber optic gyros u you know memsspace sensors everything in house plus a host of other technologies required to give full stack navigation capabilities for platforms.

[00:01:24]So I was telling you nose totail on everything you know commercial aviation military platforms you know uh the emerging unmanned systems or even urban air mobility the whole host of next generation technologies that we work on avionics communication navigation uh power systems propulsion specifically uh you know the navigation and sensors business which I belong to we have a very long legacy uh you know going all the way to World War II where a mechanical gyrobased stabilized sites you know Honeyal started making of course that was Perry at that time and then the ring laser gyros the ringer gyros were invented in Honeyville in the 1960s so very strong legacy there and uh you know today you look at commercial aviation any aircraft that you fly you know Boeing Airbus uh narrow body fixed you know widebody aircraft the primary inertial navigation system is a honeyal navigation system powered by the ring laser gyros that we make and uh you know as technology started evolving Now sensors have gotten better and better. Our abilities to uh drive performance, extract performance, reduce size, weight, power has gone better and better. So today the sensors are very small and uh can deliver extraordinary performance compared to what's available in the market. Uh and then on the MEMS side, you know, we've been we have our own silicon foundry. We make everything in-house. So uh very strong levels of capability there as well.

[00:02:52]You know we provide and support applications in the entire uh spectrum of applications in uh air, sea and land.

[00:03:01]Why do Honeywell, you know, why is Honeyal a preferred player for military OEMs and for militaries as well? One is performance. We are state-of-the-art uh reliability.

[00:03:14]Proven systems that have been performing in the field. Even those delivered in the 80s are still performing extremely accurately after several years of operation in contested spaces in challenging environments. That's why, you know, people come to us again and again. And the ability to make at scale, right? You want lower cost, cheaper, reliable source of supply. You know, supply chain is a major constraint, reliable source of supply. So that's where Honeywell comes in. and also diversified u you know supply structures. It's not one country it's spread across. We all grapple with geopolitical constraints, tariffs, embargos, export licensing related stuff. So we have variety of technologies to ensure our our customers around the world have access to various forms of capabilities from different sources.

[00:04:11]So today's topic primarily on u what we call as alternative navigation in the industry that is variety of technologies that enable GPS denied GNSS denied operation of platforms uh in different scenarios which complement core navigation today. So the core navigation is and will continue to be inertial navigation which is what is our core business too. You know gyros, accelerometers.

[00:04:38]Yes, GNSS fusion has kind of uh been the norm over the last I would say three four three decades of the Navstar GPS being in existence and now you know with that um you know the availability of GPS GNSS being suspect you know the additional complimentary technologies you know vision celestial magnetic anomaly gravity anomaly radar based aiding radon based terrain aiding various forms of technologies that uh are available and that are continuing to evolve is something we continue to complement with our core inertials and offer uh you know comprehensive end to-end capabilities on forward fit solutions as well as retrofit.

[00:05:24]See each technology has its own you know boundary conditions right? So for example vision vision is very good when you work at a slightly higher altitude you have good terrain data you can do good scene matching of course algorithms are a big thing here to what extent you can make them work but then there are some constraints. For example in a cloudy environment your daylight cameras may not work. you have to switch to a different mode of camera or you might not get visualization at all of the of the u of the ground you know and what's the complimentary technology that you can add right so it's basically a combination of technologies needed for that platform the type of chronops the types of missions that the user would like to undertake you know the right combin combination of technologies with the right core inertial sensor will help get you know reliable PNT reliable position navigation timing and help achieve the mission requirements. So um yeah we work on all of them most of them are TRL 6 plus many of them are in the field in production well proven we have our own test aircrafts we've been you know working on these technologies not today you know GPS denial is part of the conversation in the last two years 3 years in India the amount of conversations we have had over the last uh you know 2 three years has is enormous especially in the last 12 months has been you know the conversation has really really heated up but we've been working on this for a decade right we've been working on this not just in the US but you know other global sites also including in India we've been working on you know alternative navigation capabilities vision aiding uh visual rotometry visual scene matching um you know again other forms you know radar aided systems for you know tactical systems last year in the EP6 trials our systems have performed exceptionally well. Uh many of the tactical platforms we've been able to support them with uh you know EW survival capabilities. Uh we've started making these products in India. We have you know I mean even before all of this happened we were already you know plugged into the global supply chains.

[00:07:38]We have very strong supply chains in India. Uh electronics uh manufacturing you know u mechanical manufacturing. We were already doing this in India even prior to many of these things happening.

[00:07:48]So which was you know very easy for us to bring uh you know fully Indian manufactured products directly to our market work closely with the OEMs many of the OEMs we have been working much prior to you know some of these conops evolving right mean the electronic warfare conops evolving we've been working with them very closely in developing in fact we've had a lot of learnings coming in while working with them and we have continued to improve improvise the product what you see today is one of the latest generation the mult after two three iterations we have some of the you know right capable products out here and we are also you know working on very flexible architectures to take it to a variety of platforms because the number of applications number of platforms just in the US space if you see you go to any big OEM working on unmanned systems you will see a dozen platforms that they're working on different conops different requirements different sizes different weight class different operational altitudes so we we have come up with flexible architectures where you know the core nav algorithm you know the vision capabilities some of these can be hosted onto the user's uh target hardware itself plug and play with something that the user is already using or the OEM is already using on their platform you know use their cameras use their other sensors and then bring in additional capabilities so that's how we've been working and this is an agile space the platform OEMs are agile our group is equally agile too you know I cannot speak generally for large corporations but I can tell you for a fact that Our group is very agile and we have you know agile teams in India as well continuously supporting these capabilities.

[00:09:23]uh you know some of these systems you you can see the test results you know vision with you know high quality MEMS sensor you know again MEMS has is no longer cheap MEMS today Honeywell has MEMS which can gyocco compass so that means extremely high-end you know we have invested heavily in MEMS it's the state-of-the-art that MEMS can get to that means the biases that you would see in the sensor has come down tremendously in the MEMS's design so you can gerocco compass with MEMS so very small very low form factor But you get RLG FOG type accuracy. So MEMS with you know visual leading MEMS with you know terrain matching you know radar radio altimeter terrain aided navigation or MEMS with uh you know other forms of you know radar autotry can get different levels of performance with different classes of platforms. What you see here is sub 5 m level accuracy for something with vision and inertia.

[00:10:20]vision. We've been flying this for several years now. It's not now. Um we have our own aircrafts, test aircrafts.

[00:10:27]We have an embry. We have, you know, multicopters. You know, we have a AW139 in which we have all all of this equipment mounted. And we keep doing trials again and again and again, keep improving, keep trying out different sensors, keep trying out different algorithms, you know, continuously keep as the conops keep improve, you know, changing uh requirements keep changing.

[00:10:46]We continuously keep working on them, work closely with users across the world. We learn from everybody. We, you know, we improvise. We are there helping, you know, the platforms operate fully in GPS navigation, you know, in in environments meet sub 10 m accuracy consistently.

[00:11:09]So this is the system that I talked about you know that cleared uh EP6 trials with se several of our uh you know tactical OEMs. These use millimetric wave radar based velocity aiding uh sensors along with our MEMS inertials made in India uh through our you know global supply chain partners and we have variations of this coming up as well right I mean for this bird that's fine you can put you know radars facing downwards here you know how do you do it you know uh on a slightly fastoving uh in a fixed wing bird where you know aerodynamics becomes an important factor right mean So we working on configurations that can support that working on you know uh where space constraints are there. We're coming up with single board you know a credit card sized INSGPS integrated solution which runs the algorithm but then you plug in with different sensors you know through through an interface electronics.

[00:12:07]Um enough jamming spoofing trials have been done you know we have been you know part of this for the last I would say four years four five years in India. My teams have seen enough not just with one OEM with multiple OEMs been with them in trials, seen the ups and downs and you know continue to get up and pick up and improvise and learn and make you know make the product successful make our customers successful at the end help user have a very reliable solution to deploy at the at the time of need.

[00:12:42]the newer systems newer tech that we working on one is leopnt low earth orbit pet relying on nongs constellations you know emerging constellations you have players who working on leopnt these days um you have uh you know irredium who has it uh you have you know newer stuff coming in from Europe you have a you know there is also an emergent leopnt effort in India as well so a lot of work is happening we're continuing to work with a lot of players uh to continue to work on Again, as I said, flexible architecture, you know, putting together a full nav stack, a nav chain for a platform is a platform specific unique effort. So, you need to understand the platform. Um, Indrabalancer spoke heavily about, you know, requirements for safety critical engineering, reliable architectures. Um, we come from the aviation world, right? And honey is an avionic. We'll have two more minutes.

[00:13:38]>> I will finish 30 40 seconds. Yeah. So that's our expertise. That's what we bring. And by the way, Honeyal has been here doing engineering for 30 years as a GCC headquartered in Bangalore. We have 3,000 aerospace engineers working on various global programs. The expertise exists. We just have to tap into it.

[00:13:55]That's a message I would like to you know you know place in front of you tap into the expertise that GCCs have built over two three decades here. They have labs, infrastructure, a lot of stuff exists. They may have been just external facing doing global engineering sitting out of Bangalore and Hyderabad and some of these places but look at the expertise that's there look at lab infrastructure out there how do we plug in how do you how do we bring our learnings because these are all Indian people these are all Indian engineers who have spent two three decades of their career learning from the best in the world deploying safety critical capabilities we work closely with you know the DO agencies we work closely with the h we with bell we do projects with them so we bring that expertise to display and this is a new industry new emerging industry we can offer a lot by just you know bringing the expertise and guiding the emerging ecosystem yeah um again I'll leave this slide variations of sensors you name the platform choose a type of platform you know group one group two group three male hail whatever you pick your sensor you pick your navigation architecture you pick your aid for a particular conops for a particular mission we'll stitch them together you know you tell you say you don't want this country's capability you don't want you know it you don't want this you don't want that we can pick and choose from a suite from a menu of options available to stitch together a capability and you know make it work on new platforms make it work on retrofit platforms we have a you know a large fleet of existing u you know hardware that we want to make it function in contested space going forward. We can be of enormous help in doing all of that.

[00:15:47]Thank you very much sir. Thank you for the opportunity. Thank you for for being a wonderful audience. Thank you.