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Locus Lock is designing RF systems to provide navigational security. Source: Locus Lock

Flying back from Miami last week, I put my life in the hands of two strangers, just because they wore gold epaulets. These commercial pilots, in turn, trusted their onboard computers to safely navigate the passengers home. The computers accessed satellite data from the Global Positioning System to set the course.

This chain of command is very fragile. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) reported last month an increased level of GPS spoofing and signal jamming since the outbreak of the wars in Ukraine and Israel. This poses the threat of catastrophe to aviators everywhere.

For example, last September, OPS Group reported that a European flight en route to Dubai almost entered into Iranian airspace without clearance. In 2020, Iran shot down an uncleared passenger aircraft that entered its territory. This has made the major airlines, avionics manufacturers, and NATO militaries and governments scramble to find solutions.

Navigational errors can be very dangerous for commercial aircraft. Source: OPS Group

Locus Lock founder came out of drone R&D

At ff Venture Capital, we recognize that GPS spoofing and jamming are fundamental problems for aerial, terrestrial, and marine autonomous systems in moving the industry forward. This investment thesis is grounded on a simple belief that the deployment of cost-effective uncrewed systems requires the trust of human operators who can’t afford to question the data.

When machines go awry, so does the industry. Just ask Cruise! This conviction led us to invest in Locus Lock. The company said it is taking an innovative software approach to GNSS signal processing using radio frequency, at a fraction of the cost of comparable hardware sold by military contractors.

Last week, I sat down with Locus Lock founder Hailey Nichols, a former University of Texas researcher in the school’s Radionavigation Laboratory. UT’s Lab is best known for its work with SpaceX and Starlink.

At Aurora, Nichols focused on integrating suites of sensors such as lidar, GPS, radar, and computer vision for uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs). However, she quickly became frustrated with the costs and quality of the sensors.

“They were physically heavy [and] power-intensive, and it made it quite hard for engineers to integrate,” she recalled. “This problem frustrated me so much that I went back to grad school to study it further, and I joined a lab down at the University of Texas.”

In Austin, the roboticist saw a different approach to sensor data, using software for signal processing.

“The radio navigation lab was very highly specialized in signal processing, specifically bringing in advanced software algorithms and robust estimation techniques forward to sensor technology,” explained Nichols. “This enabled more precise, secure, and reliable data, like positioning, navigation, and timing.”

Her epiphany came when she saw the market demand for the lab’s GNSS receiver from the U.S. Department of Defense and commercial partners after Locus Lock published research on autonomous vehicles accurately navigating urban canyons.

Navigating urban canyons is a challenge for conventional satellite-based systems. Source: Quora

Reliable navigation needed for dual-use applications

Today, Locus Lock is ready to market its product more widely for dual-use applications across the spectrum of autonomy for commercial and defense use cases.

“Current GPS receivers often fail in what’s called ‘urban multipath,'” said Nichols. “This is where there’s building interference and shrouding of the sky can cause positioning errors. This can be problematic for autonomous cars, drones, and outdoor robotics that need access to centimeter-level positioning to make safe and informed decisions about where they are on the road or in the sky.”

The RF engineer continued: “Our other applicable industry is defense tech. With the rise of the Ukraine conflict and the Israel conflict in the Middle East, we’ve seen a massive amount of deliberate interference. So bad actors that are either spoofing or jamming, causing major outages or disruptions in GPS positioning.”

Locus Lock addresses this problem by enabling its GPS processing suite as a software solution, and unlike hardware, it’s affordable and extremely flexible.

“The ability to be backward-compatible and future-proof where we can constantly update and evolve our GPS processing suite to evolving attack vectors ensures that our customers are given the most cutting-edge and up-to-date processing techniques to enable centimeter-level positioning globally,” added Nichols.

“So our GNSS receivers are software-defined radio [SDR] with a specialized variant of inertially aided RTK [real-time kinematics],” she said, claiming that it provides a differentiator from competing products. “What that means is we’re doing some advanced sensor-fusion techniques with GNSS signals in addition to inertial navigation to ensure that, even in these pockets of urban canyons where you may not have access to GNSS signals … the GPS receiver [will] still provide centimeter-level positioning.”

As Nichols boasted, Locus Lock is an enabler of “next generation autonomous mobility.”

Locus Lock looks to affordable centimeter-level accuracy

While traditional GPS components cost around $40,000, Locus Lock said its its proprietary software and a 2-in. board cost around $2,000. Today, centimeter accuracy is inaccessible to most robot companies because most suppliers of robust hardware are military contractors, including L3Harris Technologies, BAE Systems, Northrop Grumman, and Elbit Systems.

“We’ve specifically made sure to cater our solution towards more low-cost environments that can proliferate mass-market autonomy and robotics into the ecosystem,” stated Nichols.

Locus Lock puts its software on a 2-in. board. Source: Oliver Mitchell

Nichols added that Locus Lock’s GNSS receiver is able to pull in data from global and regional satellite constellations.

“[This gives] us more access to any signals in the sky at any given time,” said the startup founder. “Diversity is also increasingly important in next-generation GPS receivers because it allows the device to evade jammed or afflicted channels.”

Grand View Research estimated that the SDR market will climb to nearly $50 billion by 2030. As uncrewed systems proliferate, Locus Lock’s price point should also come down, asserted Nichols.

“And while there are some companies that have progressed their autonomy stacks to be quite high, they haven’t gotten their prices down to make sense in a mass-market scenario,” she said. “And so it’s crucial to enable this next generation of autonomous mobility at large to not compromise on performance but to be able to provide this at an affordable price. Locus Lock is providing high-end performance at a much lower price point.”

Nichols even predicted that the company could eventually get product to under $1,000, if not less, with more adoption.

Source: Grand View Research

Tesla Optimus takes steps toward more mobile systems

Yesterday, Tesla published on X the latest video of its Optimus humanoid moving fluidly at an incredible gait for a robot. Pitchbook recently predicted that this could be a breakout period for humanoids, with 84 leading companies now having raised over $4.6 billion.

Tesla’s Optimus Robot Achieves New Milestones in Mobility and Task Efficiency

Advanced Mobility Showcased:
Tesla’s latest clip of the Optimus humanoid robot demonstrates significant advancements in fluid mobility, as the robot is seen taking smooth strides within a testing… pic.twitter.com/hMlq2w3tQ7

— Tesla Pablo 🔋⚡ (@pablo9948967714) February 25, 2024

At the same time, the prospect of such advanced machines being hijacked via GPS spoofing into the service of terrorists, cybercriminals, or hostile governments is very real and horrifying. Thankfully, Nichols and her team are working with the Army Futures Command.

“A lot of this work has been done in spoofing and jamming — not only detection, but also mitigation,” she said. “We detect the type of RF environment that we are operating in to mitigate it and inform that end user with the situational awareness that is needed to assess ongoing attacks.”

“In addition, we can iterate much faster and bring in world-class experts on security and encryption to ensure that we protect secure military signals as much as possible,” said Nichols. “Our software can find assured reception that is demanded by these increasingly expensive and important assets that the military needs to protect.”

In ffVC’s view, our newest portfolio company is mission-critical to operating drones, robots, and other autonomous vessels safely, affordably, and securely in an increasingly dangerous world.