ANELLO’s silicon photonics optical gyroscope is enabling GPS-free navigation

For decades, GPS has been the cornerstone of modern navigation, guiding aircraft, vehicles, troops and commercial systems across the globe. As digital warfare intensifies, satellite signals are increasingly unreliable. From the battlefield to underground tunnels, to dense forests, and urban canyons, global positioning signals are being jammed, spoofed, or simply blocked by the environment. In these GPS-denied zones, the risks to navigation, targeting and mission success grow exponentially.

Without reliable positioning, systems lose their sense of location, direction and speed — making it impossible to navigate to their destination. Yet in modern warfare, autonomous systems and industrial automation depend on precise and continuous navigation. ANELLO Photonics is tackling this gap head-on with a breakthrough silicon photonics-based optical gyroscope (SiPhOG) technology — one that seeks to reshape how machines, soldiers and vehicles navigate across land, air and sea when satellites fall silent.

A Battlefield Blind Spot

In GPS-contested environments such as urban warzones, subterranean tunnels, dense forests or near hostile jamming equipment, traditional navigation solutions fail. Spoofing attacks can instantaneously displace autonomous vehicles by kilometers. Jamming can cripple UAVs mid-flight, causing them to crash. Even in civilian settings — especially in and around conflict zones — GPS signal loss can disrupt commercial fleets, emergency responders, and industries like mining or agriculture. These dropouts stall autonomous operations, reduce productivity, and increase the risk of severe damage.

These issues aren’t hypothetical. Adversaries have demonstrated sophisticated GPS interference capabilities that can mislead or immobilize multi-million-dollar defense assets. The need for self-contained, spoof-resistant navigation has never been more urgent.

Strategic-Grade Precision in a Chip

ANELLO Photonics took a radically new approach to building gyroscopes when it built its Silicon Photonics Optical Gyroscope (SiPhOG) using the same semiconductor processes used for integrated circuits. This breakthrough makes it possible to deliver high-precision optical navigation in a chip-scale form factor — smaller than a fingernail. The SiPhOG harnesses the proven Sagnac effect — central to traditional fiber-optic gyroscopes (FOGs) — but ANELLO has reimagined it using advanced silicon photonics, integrating this into a compact silicon photonic chip.

This innovation enables:

• Bias drift < 0.5°/hr. A performance level previously only achieved by large, costly fiber-optic systems.
• Nanoradian-scale angular sensitivity. Essential for accurate navigation over long durations.
• Superior to MEMS. Resilient to vibration, thermal variation and EMI — ideal for combat zones and industrial environments.
• Compact, coin-sized form factor. Easily integrates into existing systems and is small enough to be used for soldier-worn devices, embedded robotics and scalable mass-market applications.

The ANELLO SiPhOG offers the precision of strategic-grade FOG systems, but with the size, weight, power and cost suitable for widespread tactical deployment to the mass market. This balance makes it uniquely positioned to serve both high-end defense missions and cost-sensitive commercial markets.

The Full-Stack INS Advantage

SiPhOGs alone aren’t enough. ANELLO integrates its SiPhOGs with accelerometers, magnetometers, GPS (when available) and onboard CPU logic into a full-stack inertial navigation system (INS). Additionally, these systems use the ANELLO AI-based sensor-fusion engine to intelligently reconcile data, validate signal integrity and detect anomalies, such as jammed or spoofed GPS locations or signal dropouts across land, air and sea. The ANELLO AI sensor-fusion engine processes and tracks in real time the inertial position and GPS position every ~10 ms. The system auto-corrects and seamlessly transitions the sensor modes without any human intervention — always determining what is correct and what is false or being spoofed. The ANELLO AI sensor-fusion engine is continuously being tested and optimized by the ANELLO team with various customers in the field.

The result is a self-contained, intelligent navigation platform that maintains accurate heading, velocity and position — even in total GPS darkness. The modularity of the ANELLO systems also enables easy integration into various host platforms, from aerial drones to armored vehicles to autonomous boats and robots.

Field-Proven Resilience in Defense

During U.S. Department of Defense trials, ANELLO’s INS systems successfully identified and mitigated GPS spoofing attempts in real time. When a vehicle’s GPS feed suddenly shifted its perceived location by kilometers, ANELLO’s AI engine flagged the change as physically impossible, rejected the GPS input and seamlessly relied on ANELLO inertial data to maintain accurate positioning.

Such robustness makes the ANELLO technology suitable for:

• UAVs operating in jammed or contested airspace
• Autonomous Ground Vehicles (AGVs) navigating GPS-denied terrain • Marine systems facing jammed or spoofed GPS signals
• Land vehicles such as emergency responders and even delivery vehicles
• Handheld soldier systems that demand compact, rugged navigation capabilities for on-the-move operations.

Whether installed on armored vehicles, on drones, or embedded in next-gen infantry kits, ANELLO’s optical gyro-based solutions deliver location certainty when precision and accuracy matter.

Cross-Sector Use Cases

Autonomy Without Satellites: While defense remains a clear application, the broader commercial value is just as transformative. In agriculture, autonomous vehicles often lose GPS coverage under thick orchard canopies. In underground mines or port operations, satellites are blocked entirely. In these environments, ANELLO’s SiPhOG-powered INS continues to provide reliable localization and position, ensuring autonomous systems don’t stall, stray or crash.

Commercial applications for ANELLO’s SiPhOG technology include:

• Autonomous mining vehicles. Enables self-driving trucks and loaders to navigate through tunnels and signal-blocked environments with precision and safety.
• Port automation and crane systems. Supports operation of automated cranes and cargo movers in GNSS-challenged port environments for uninterrupted container handling and improved throughput.
• Industrial robotics and logistics. Powers warehouse robots and inspection systems with high-precision navigation in indoor and metallic environments where GPS is unreliable or unavailable.
• Autonomous maritime systems. Facilitates reliable navigation for unmanned surface vessels (USVs) and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) operating in coastal, harbor, or fully submerged missions where satellite signals are compromised.

With rapid integration into commercial drones, robotic forklifts and construction fleets, ANELLO is extending military-grade navigation into everyday autonomy use cases.

Smarter Navigation in Real Time

At the heart of ANELLO’s platform is a sophisticated AI sensor fusion engine. Every 10 ms, the system ingests data from multiple sensors, validates physics-based plausibility and recalibrates its state estimates. This allows the system to detect and reject spoofed GPS signals, continue navigation autonomously through temporary GPS dropouts and identify signal degradation before failure occurs.

This intelligence is what makes the system robust, not just a fallback, but a fully capable primary navigation method in harsh and dynamic environments. It also significantly reduces the operational risk and support burden typically associated with traditional inertial systems.

Compact, Scalable, Mission-Ready

As conflicts evolve and global infrastructure expands into GPS-hostile regions, inertial systems must become smaller, smarter and more affordable. ANELLO is advancing a roadmap toward fully integrated, chip-scale INS platforms with gyros, lasers, processors and algorithms all on a single platform. This enables faster deployment in the field, lower system power consumption and broader adoption across vast use cases for military and industrial systems.

The company’s domestic chip fabrication capability also ensures supply chain security, an increasingly critical factor in national defense and industrial automation strategies. From soldier systems and UAVs to autonomous cargo vehicles and industrial robots, ANELLO’s technology is positioning itself as a cornerstone for resilient, GPS-independent autonomy.

Navigatng a Standard for a Contested World

The future of autonomous operations—military and civilian alike—will need to depend on navigation systems that do not falter when GPS disappears. With its SiPhOG-based inertial platform, ANELLO Photonics is offering not just a backup system, but a new standard: one that combines strategic-grade precision, compact design and AI-driven reliability that can be delivered to the mass market and installed into any vehicle or any moving platform.

In an era where signal denial is not just a threat but a tactic, assured positioning is no longer optional—it’s essential. ANELLO is redefining the future of navigation, empowering not just autonomous systems but also the people who rely on navigation to operate with confidence and precision — anywhere, anytime — even when the sky goes dark.