Enabling UAV Navigation at the Edge
Specialized Engineering Scope & Mission Challenge
An autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) defense program needed to achieve GPS-denied navigation and real-time obstacle avoidance on compute-constrained edge hardware. During high-velocity tactical maneuvers and electronic warfare jamming, satellite navigation drops out, requiring millisecond-level sensor fusion between inertial measurement units (IMU), visual odometry, and LiDAR. Legacy prototypes suffered from thermal throttling on embedded SoCs and unbounded latency in sensor packet decoding, leading to trajectory drift and mission abortion.
Granular Competency & Technical Requirement Matrix
Critical Engineering & Integration Complexities
- Deterministic sensor fusion loop requirement under 10ms with zero allowable queue dropouts during abrupt GPS outages.
- Tight thermal envelope of edge compute modules inside sealed carbon-fiber airframes causing CPU throttling.
- Asynchronous phase jitter between high-rate IMU (1 kHz) and camera visual odometry (30 fps) causing state divergence.
- Verification of complex fail-safe fallbacks (dead-reckoning, return-to-base) across dynamic simulated wind shear.
Engineered Delivery & Execution Workflow
Compute & Sensor Profiling
Benchmarked latency bottlenecks in sensor ingestion across SPI, UART, and MIPI CSI buses on the target embedded SoC.
EKF Core Optimization
Rewrote the extended Kalman filter state-estimation pipeline in cache-optimized, zero-allocation C++.
Preemptive Task Partitioning
Configured RTOS prioritisation, assigning dedicated core affinity and DMA buffers to critical IMU feeds.
Simulated GPS Jamming Scenarios
Built an automated HIL test environment simulating abrupt satellite loss and dynamic sensor spoofing.
Thermal & Power Profiling
Tuned DVFS (dynamic voltage/frequency scaling) policies to eliminate thermal throttling under maximum flight loads.
Telemetry & Blackbox Logging
Engineered a deterministic circular buffer logging full state vectors to high-speed NVMe flash.
Flight Dynamics Sign-Off
Validated autonomous trajectory adherence across 200+ hardware-in-the-loop stress profiles.
Production Toolchains, Protocols & Frameworks
06 | PROJECT TARGETS
Project Targets and Business Impact
Customer Confidentiality Note: Customer identity, proprietary codebases, and commercial program specifics have been anonymized in accordance with non-disclosure agreements.