Northrop Grumman is developing high speed navigation technology that will allow military aircraft and airborne weapon systems to guide themselves to targets on land or sea without using GPS satellite signals.

The All Source Adaptive Fusion (ASAF) software will enable military platforms and weapons systems to retain their sense of location, speed and direction, even when operating in denied or degraded GPS environments.

The software uses high-speed algorithms and hardware to generate navigational solutions from data gathered from a variety of sources including radar, EO/IR, light detection and ranging, star tracker, magnetometer, altimeter and other signals of opportunity.

ASAF has been tested in flight demonstrations with a number of US military offices, proving its ability to navigate aircraft safely and precisely to both fixed (land) and mobile (ship-based) locations.

In one land-based flight at the Royal Australian Air Force’s Woomera Test Range, ASAF software was demonstrated configured in an absolute navigation mode. A UAS navigated accurately from a known location to a specified location using input from a sensor package and geo-registration software to improve navigation accuracy.

The software has also been tested on a Bell 407 helicopter during flight to allow it to keep track of a vessel’s location and its own position, attitude and velocity relative to it.

Scott Stapp, vice president, applied technology, Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems, said: ‘Our absolute (fixed) and relative (mobile) navigation technologies will protect a wide range of critical US military missions between ships and shore from disruption by GPS denial techniques, even in adverse weather and high sea-state conditions.

‘Intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; cargo delivery; all-weather targeting and strike are among the missions that would benefit from the new ‘denied GPS’ technology.’