← Back to list of papers of the 2026 EuroGNC conference

CEAS EuroGNC 2026

GNSS-Denied Architecture for Unmanned Aerial Systems: From Classical Inertial Navigation to Drift-Free Performance
Laura Train García PhD Candidate, Escuela Superior de Ingeniería Aeronáutica y del Espacio (ETSIAE), Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain. Navigation Engineer, UAV Navigation - Grupo Oesia, San Sebastián de los Reyes (Madrid), Spain.
Miguel Ángel de Frutos Carro Managing Director and CTO, UAV Navigation - Grupo Oesia, San Sebastián de los Reyes (Madrid), Spain.
José María Pulido Fernández Navigation Team Leader, UAV Navigation - Grupo Oesia, San Sebastián de los Reyes (Madrid), Spain.
José Manuel Torrente Delgado Navigation Engineer, UAV Navigation - Grupo Oesia, San Sebastián de los Reyes (Madrid), Spain.
Javier Bernal Urbaneja Navigation Engineer, UAV Navigation - Grupo Oesia, San Sebastián de los Reyes (Madrid), Spain.
Antonio Alejandro Aslan Suárez Navigation Engineer, UAV Navigation - Grupo Oesia, San Sebastián de los Reyes (Madrid), Spain.
Pablo Chiva Ruiz Navigation Engineer, UAV Navigation - Grupo Oesia, San Sebastián de los Reyes (Madrid), Spain.
Abstract:
This work presents a navigation architecture for unmanned aerial vehicles designed to ensure reliable performance in GNSS-denied environments. The proposed system integrates two complementary modules to achieve drift-free navigation under jamming and spoofing. The first module, the AD-AHRS, fuses inertial, magnetometer, and air data measurements to estimate attitude and predict position and velocity states. It also includes integrity monitoring to detect GNSS degradation and accepts corrections from the visual navigation module, which comprises four submodules: visual odometry, template matching, terrain reference navigation, and map matching. Visual odometry estimates velocity by tracking feature displacements across frames, while template matching enables position updates in mapped areas. When flying over regions not flown before, terrain reference navigation correlates digital elevation models with radar altimeter profiles to mitigate drift at low altitude, whereas at higher altitudes, map matching compares onboard imagery with satellite maps to obtain absolute position. Combining these methods yields a navigation solution robust to GNSS outages and cumulative drift. The paper describes the architecture, presents validation results from datasets, and reports flight tests conducted during Jammertest 2025 under intentional jamming and spoofing.
Keywords:  GNSS-denied; sensor fusion; terrain reference; visual map matching; jamming and spoofing resilience
 View PDF CEAS-GNC-2026-055 doi: 10.82124/CEAS-GNC-2026-055


Laura Train García, Miguel Ángel de Frutos Carro, José María Pulido Fernández, José Manuel Torrente Delgado, Javier Bernal Urbaneja, Antonio Alejandro Aslan Suárez, Pablo Chiva Ruiz: GNSS-Denied Architecture for Unmanned Aerial Systems: From Classical Inertial Navigation to Drift-Free Performance. Proceedings of the 2026 CEAS EuroGNC conference. Madrid, Spain. May 2026. doi: 10.82124/CEAS-GNC-2026-055.
BibTeX entry (UTF-8):

@Incollection{CEAS-GNC-2026-055,
    author = {Train García, Laura and de Frutos Carro, Miguel Ángel and Pulido Fernández, José María and Torrente Delgado, José Manuel and Bernal Urbaneja, Javier and Aslan Suárez, Antonio Alejandro and Chiva Ruiz, Pablo},
    title = {GNSS-Denied Architecture for Unmanned Aerial Systems: From Classical Inertial Navigation to Drift-Free Performance},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2026 {CEAS EuroGNC} conference},
    address = {Madrid, Spain},
    month = may,
    year = {2026},
    doi = {10.82124/CEAS-GNC-2026-055}
}