Leidos Seeks to Help Warfighters in GPS-Denied Environments With Positioning Tech

The Department of Defense is looking for alternative platforms that could provide navigation and positioning data in GPS-denied environments and Leidos is one of the companies that could help meet the need, C4ISRNET reported Wednesday.

Leidos has developed the Assured Data Engine for Positioning and Timing system, which uses sensors, algorithms and satellite imagery to provide navigation data in areas where GPS is denied. The platform can also be integrated into drones.

“In a nutshell, you’ve got a sensor on the bottom of your aircraft, and it can either be your ISR sensor ball that’s looking around, looking for bad guys or whatever, or it can be a dedicated camera looking down, and it’s taking an image,” Scott Sexton, a robotics navigation engineer at Leidos, said of ADEPT.

“We run it through an image-processing algorithm that pulls out key features from the image and it’s all automated, and so the algorithm knows what’s interesting and what’s not,” he added. “That creates a unique thumbprint.”

The report said the ADEPT system works to provide positioning data using the thumbprint and screening the geotagged satellite images to identify a match.