IXEAN Landas

To operate in GPS-denied environments and to counter other forms of electronic warfare, IXEAN has locally onboarded a 3rd neural network with a custom extended Kalman filter.  This is our novel neural inertial odometry system that allows the drone to estimate its GPS position at all times with high accuracy using just inertial sensor measurements such as those from the accelerometer. 

We call this the IXEAN Landas, which stands for Pathway.  

The Landas builds on and addresses the many issues of the latest inertial odometry literature.  What sets our system apart from commonly used state-of-the-art odometric systems is that these other systems often require heavy use of either LIDAR  or vision-based sensors (visual inertial odometry). We achieve local and global position estimation with these benchmark visual inertial odometry systems with much less hardware use. With our Landas system, we can return to home fully autonomously even if the GPS module is completely jammed. This also allows us to fly to predefined waypoints that are potentially dense with electronic warfare countermeasures. High-accuracy pure inertial odometry systems are rare and extremely lightweight and low cost.

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In the plots above, we can see the estimated velocities and trajectories of IXEAN Landas versus the actual ground truth. It is capable of closely following the movements of the drone even for extended periods of time.