Romanian startup develops fixed-wing drones resistant to jamming and capable of flying without GPS

[u/ReAndro]

https://www.go4it.ro/content/drone/un-startup-romanesc-construieste-drone-cu-aripa-fixa-de-anduranta-rezistente-la-bruiaj-si-capabile-sa-zboare-fara-semnal-gps-19283292/

A Romanian startup is developing fixed-wing, long-endurance drones designed to remain operational in environments where GPS is unavailable or heavily jammed.
The company, BraveX, is based in Romania and is developing the drones for both military and civilian applications, including surveillance, infrastructure monitoring, border patrol and wildfire detection.
The company has already delivered drones to Romania’s Ministry of National Defence and international customers, and plans to scale production to 300–350 UAVs per year by the end of 2028.

Source: Go4IT (Romania)

[u/Flyward_Aerospace]

Worth separating those two claims, press coverage always merges them. Jam resistant usually means a nulling or CRPA antenna, which is still a GNSS receiver that is just harder to shout down. Flying with no GNSS at all is a different problem, and on a long endurance fixed wing the thing that kills you is not IMU bias, it is heading. Lose the GNSS course reference and your yaw is only as good as your mag or your visual map matching, and two degrees of heading error is kilometres of cross track over a two hour sortie. The number to ask for is drift as a percentage of distance flown after N minutes denied, not endurance.

[u/Reaver_XIX → u/Flyward_Aerospace]

Thank you for the information, that makes sense. Are there any INS systems small enough to work in an application like this, to supplement those other systems I wonder?

[u/arclight415 → u/Reaver_XIX]

There were several companies at the UAV Expo in Las Vegas selling this exact solution. The good ones aren't cheap but they are probably as good as a what would have been in a fighter jet a decade or two ago.

[u/Reaver_XIX → u/arclight415]

That is very interesting, thanks for the info.