infiniDome, an Israeli developer of anti-GPS jamming systems, recently released a white-paper report focusing on various GPS jamming technologies, as well as countermeasures (such as the company’s own GPSdome product). While GPS jamming might not be front-of-mind for many drone operators, both government and civilian clients worldwide are vulnerable to GPS disruption techniques, which can send expensive drones falling from the sky as hackers use easily-acquired tools to attack the GPS access of drone units. Because the satellite-based GPS signal that actually reaches vehicles and drones is fairly weak, using an RF emitter at the same frequencies at which GPS operates can have catastrophic effects, as was seen in Zhengzhou, China, when an attack on a light show saw hundreds of drones fall to the ground.
The paper discusses the different kinds of attacks jammers try in order to bring drones down, as well as technologies to counter them. Typically, the denial of service attacks on GPS networks are made by powerful RF emitters, which can use a variety of methods to try and interfere with the satellite connection between a drone or vehicle and the satellite networks above. To counter this, anti-jamming devices can either try to redirect the high-frequency beams (using beam forming or steering) or to attenuate attacking frequencies and create “null zones”, which are more effective but more difficult to roll out. Infinidome’s own product is a smaller form-factor “null steering” unit, with antenna sensors that can independently fight off attempts at signal jamming, aiding in uninterrupted operation.
infiniDome’s technology has already seen real-world use, with the case study highlighting the successful use of their product to counter Syrian attempts to jam Israeli drones in the Golan Heights region engaged in both commercial and military tasks. In side-by-side testing, a video provided by infiniDome showed drones protected using the GPSdome system were able to distinguish sophisticated jamming techniques like mimicking real GNSS systems from the actual signal, allowing them to operate continuously while other drones failed to maintain their GPS connection. As awareness of drone security increases worldwide, operators should consider whether to adopt systems to counter GPS jamming and protect their drones from being brought down by bad actors.
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Miriam McNabb is the Editor-in-Chief of DRONELIFE and CEO of JobForDrones, a professional drone services marketplace, and a fascinated observer of the emerging drone industry and the regulatory environment for drones. Miriam has penned over 3,000 articles focused on the commercial drone space and is an international speaker and recognized figure in the industry. Miriam has a degree from the University of Chicago and over 20 years of experience in high tech sales and marketing for new technologies. For drone industry consulting or writing, Email Miriam.
InfiniDome targets proportional GPS protection with navigational resiliency.
C-Astral’s SQA eVTOL. Photo courtesy of C-Astral Aerospace.
InfiniDome is on a mission to provide GPS protection and navigation resiliency solutions for defending UAVs and, increasingly, other vehicles from jamming attacks. The company seeks to focus more than its competitors do on addressing customer needs for lower cost, weight and size in pursuit of higher volumes in commercial markets.
At June’s Eurosatory conference, Europe’s largest international security and defense exhibition, the Israel-based company’s flagship GPSdome technology was showcased by C-Astral Aerospace on its SQA eVTOL. C-Astral, an industry leader in fixed-wing UAVs, cited InfiniDome’s ability to protect its UAVs from jamming attacks, adding resiliency in GPS-challenged environments.
The small retrofit device is compatible with any GNSS-based system but is tailored for Class 1-3 drones. It combines patterns from two omnidirectional antennas and integrates into C-Astral Aerospace’s UAV GNSS system, filtering out any RF interference.
“The InfiniDome system really helps us, and especially our customers, to mitigate jamming problems we are seeing in complex contemporary electromagnetic environments,” said Marko Peljhan, co-founder of the Slovenia-based company.
HONEYWELL BACKING
The C-Astral Aerospace application is just the latest example of InfiniDome’s high-profile support.
In April, the GPS security company announced closure of a pre-series A round of $2.4 million that includes backing from NextGear Ventures, the Israeli lead in an earlier seed round, along with Charlotte, North Carolina’s Honeywell Ventures, which joined the latest funding.
“As an early investor in InfiniDome, we know we have a truly world-class team that would emerge as the leader in the commercial and low SWaP (size, weight and power) GPS protection market,” said Tal Cohen, Ph.D., managing partner at NextGear Ventures.
“This is a strategic investment for Honeywell, as we see GPS protection as a critical complement to our inertial navigation capabilities,” said Matt Picchetti, vice president and general manager of Honeywell’s navigation and sensors business.
In April, Honeywell announced several advanced alternative navigation technologies intended to help ensure seamless navigation even when GPS signals are blocked, interrupted or unavailable. Among them were INSs (inertial navigation systems) paired with InfiniDome’s GPSdome that showed significant improvement in position accuracy and integrity performance in the presence of GPS jamming.
Late last year, InfiniDome, Honeywell and drone-in-a-box company Easy Aerial demonstrated a first-ever “fully resilient” navigation system—integrating GPS anti-jamming technology, an inertial system and a radar velocity system—that allows UAVs to complete their missions in the harshest environments.
InfiniDome’s GPSdome protects agains GPS jamming.
InfiniDome’s GPSdome installed on a Copterpix drone. Photos courtesy of InfiniDome.
FILLING A NICHE
At AUVSI’s Xponential event in April, InfiniDome’s founder and CEO, Omer Sharar, and VP of Sales Ben Sandford talked about the GPS security company’s end-to-end anti-jamming, monitoring and protection solutions for drone, fleet and critical infrastructure assets, as well as about industry trends and plans for the future.
The company was founded in June 2016 by Omer Sharar; Ehud Sharar, president and VP, manufacturing; and Moshe Kaplan, CTO. According to Omer Sharar, the world of unmanned vehicles has been changing in the past few years. Much of the shift is being driven by desires for lower costs and higher volumes.
“End customers don’t want to purchase just a couple of multimillion- dollar UAVs anymore,” he said. “They want to purchase hundreds to tens of thousands worth of UAVs.”
Most of the anti-jamming technology his company and other competitors offer was born in the military.
“Up until now, it was being led by the big 10,000-pound gorillas out there, the Rockwell Collins, the Raytheons, the Lockheed Martins,” Sharar said. “We’re the first ones who were coming in saying, ‘Hey, we can do it in a different way. Come to a knife fight with a knife and not with a bazooka.’”
His company is looking to fill a niche with “proportional protection.”
“We are bringing a new product into the market—smaller, lighter, less expensive than the rest of the products out there—and also less classified,” Sharar said. “That is our main differentiator.”
InfiniDome offers an alternative to other defense electronics manufacturers such as IAI (Israel Aerospace Industries) and Elbit Systems that are making anti-jamming systems for protection of fighter jets, helicopters and combat ships.
“Even in the military, with a $50,000 drone, you cannot afford, in terms of size, weight, power and sheer cost, a Lockheed Martin or Elbit anti-jamming system that, by itself costs $50,000 and up, and weighs sometimes more than the drone itself,” said Sharar. “Our main differentiator is our CSWaP [cost, size, weight and power]. We can basically fit in on platforms that they cannot.”
JAMMING GOES MAINSTREAM
The No. 1 threat in performing autonomous missions, specifically in the air, is signal loss from GNSS and global variants GPS, Galileo, GLONASS, BeiDou and RNSS/SBAS, Sharar said.
While some nimble receiver competitors are making their units smaller, lighter, cheaper and more accurate, they don’t solve the vulnerability problem, Sharar continued. All a denial-of-service attacker has to do is transmit a signal in the vicinity of the frequency at a bit more powerful level to interrupt the signal—and that’s getting easier to do.
A GPS jammer for both L1 and L2 signals from online stores like Alibaba can cost about $50, he said. Though illegal, it can “kill” every GPS in a radius of about 100 meters (330 feet). An off-the-shelf amplifier bought online could expand that zone to the kilometer range.
U.S. consumers are helping to drive this jammer commoditization.
“Americans are very jealous for their own privacy, and they don’t want people tracking them,” Sharar said.
The easiest way to elude tracking is to use a jammer to hide a location, but it’s illegal to transmit something in the GPS frequency because of the collateral damage it can create, Sharar said.
Sandford mentioned the then-infamous example from August 2013, when a truck driver with a GPS jammer who wanted to conceal an on-duty rendezvous with a girlfriend accidentally shut the Newark airport down.
CURRENT AND FUTURE TECH
The GPSdome offering is just 74 x 47 x 25 millimeters (2.9 x 1.9 x 1.0 inches) and 150 grams (5.3 ounces). It uses a nulling algorithm to attenuate the jamming signal in the direction of attack, allowing navigation and operation to continue in GPS-challenged environments.
As Sharar explained it, the technology is a little bit like noise-cancellation headphones. It attenuates the noise—or the jamming—directionally.
“We’re sensing from where it’s coming, and attenuating it, allowing you to continue on hearing the music, continue on being locked onto the satellite,” he said.
The GPSdome and OEM board.
The tech uses multiple off-the-shelf antennas (instead of a single antenna), combining their signal patterns. It is based on an electronic warfare technology called null steering rather than on-beam forming. A key advantage is that the tech is designed for easy retrofitting.
“We can work with almost any receiver on the market and almost any antenna on the market, unlike a lot of the military guys, which are saying, ‘Here, take this block with the antennas and the receiver,’” Sharar said. “We try to make the adoption barrier to be as small as possible.”
Coming soon is InfiniDome’s next-generation technology with better anti-jamming, along with protection from multiple directions at the same time.
“The first prototypes are being released to a very small number of strategic customers,” Sharar said. “That is a very important milestone for the company to pass. That is the project that we’re doing with the U.S. Army.”
Other customers include the Israeli Defense Forces and some of the primes. The new technology will also have use cases in other industries, which, Sharar noted, is very important.
GOING COMMERCIAL
The biggest customer pain-point has been in the defense and homeland security sectors, so that’s where InfiniDome has been focused. Looking strategically into the future, the company is setting its sights on other markets.
One of those is the commercial UAV market for drones delivering COVID samples or burgers, Sharar said. The opportunity extends to higher-volume package deliveries from the likes of Walmart, Amazon Prime Air and Google Wings.
“The future of the company is definitely and strategically in the commercial space, because all of these wonderful commercial applications based on autonomous drones or even on autonomous vehicles will not happen without adequate security,” Sharar said. “You cannot have drones falling out of the sky on somebody’s head.”
KEEP ON TRUCKIN’
Beyond the commercial UAV space, another big anti-jamming challenge exists with commercial trucks, with some of the more pressing customer needs coming from Latin America, Sharar said.
“Mexico loses about 1% of its GDP annually to cargo theft,” he said. “The cartels’ modus operandi is basically using GPS jammers to make trucks disappear.”
Once a truck is completely off the grid, criminals can hijack it at gunpoint, take it off-road, unload its cargo and drive away with it—and a dispatcher doesn’t even know.
InfiniDome is getting “a lot of requests from the trucking industry for protection of GPS, but also protection for cellular signals, which is another direction that we’re looking into, providing protection for that market,” Shahar said.
In response, InfiniDome introduced OtoSphere, which, according to the company, is the world’s first GPS cyberattack detection and protection solution tailored for commercial and consumer vehicles. It was designed for cash-in-transit, high-end cargo transportation and autonomous vehicle applications that depend on GPS for localization, timing and monitoring.
OtoSphere protects these transit applications, which are disabled by inexpensive GPS jammers bought online, with infiniDome’s patented phased-array anti-jamming technology to solve the problem easily and cost-effectively.
CHASING VOLUME
Tactically looking at InfiniDome’s initial focus on the defense and homeland security, Shahar saw “a market currently with the hundreds of systems per year that we’re selling. We’re looking into growth of three to four times, year over year, for the next few years.”
However, Sharar envisioned far greater volume potential in the commercial space.
“The estimations right now are at roughly about a million drones that will be in the air,” he concluded. “I’m not talking about toy drones; these are commercial enterprise- level drones, performing delivery missions. So, obviously, that is the main goal for us: to be there when the market is ready with the right kind of product.”
Honeywell’s recent demos of alternative navigation systems included InfiniDome’s GPSdome.
In November 2021 in Israel, infiniDome, Honeywell, and Easy Aerial demonstrated a UAV-tailored resilient navigation solution to complete critical missions under GPS challenged and denied environments. The three companies demonstrated the fully operational robust navigation system integrating GPS anti-jamming technology, inertial system and radar velocity system into a fully resilient navigation system for UAVs.
The robust navigation system, jointly developed by Honeywell and infiniDome, solves the GPS jamming problem by tightly pairing GNSS-based UAV-tailored Honeywell Compact Inertial Navigation System (HCINS) with infiniDome’s GPS anti-jamming technology (GPSdome), integrated with Honeywell’s Radar-based Velocity System (HRVS). The Robust Navigation System is a one-stop shop that can be installed on almost any UAV with a common flight controller (e.g. PixHawk) providing it with continuous, accurate navigation data in GNSS-challenged or fully GNSS-denied environments.
The main goal for the November demo was to prove the Robust Navigation System capabilities in maintaining autonomous navigation operation for multi-copters under different GPS/GNSS jamming scenarios. The demo was attended by Israeli defense primes, drone and UAV manufacturers and government end-users.
The testing was set up at the testing range in the center of Israel where 2 military-grade directional jammers (different types & bandwidths) were used to jam the navigation system of an Easy Aerial Osprey Hexa-copter operating with a PixHawk 2.1 Cube Black.
The purpose of the test was to show that a UAV protected by the Robust Navigation System, under a GPS challenged environment (single direction of jamming) and fully denied environment (multiple directions of powerful jamming by military-grade jammers) can perform BVLOS and autonomous tasks accurately and safely without needing to assume manual control of the UAV. The companies successfully displayed and recorded that the UAV, protected by the Robust Navigation System solution, passed all planned tests and proved that in a GNSS-challenged environment and even in full GNSS-denied environment, the UAV can not only safely land or return home, it can complete its BVLOS / autonomous mission.
The demo also showed that an unprotected drone, when attacked by the same jammers, within 3-5 seconds loses position accuracy and GNSS fix, tilts at an aggressive angle and takes off in seconds in a random direction. The only way to avoid it drifting kilometers away and eventually crashing is by taking manual control and visually bringing it back.
infiniDome, Honeywell and Easy Aerial, demonstrated the first UAV-tailored, Robust Navigation System which integrates GPS anti-jamming technology (#GPSdome), Radar Velocity System (#HRVS) and Inertial Navigation System (#HCINS) into the first-ever fully resilient system allowing UAVs not only to safely operate but successfully complete their missions, even in GPS challenged or fully denied environments.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are being increasingly used in what were traditionally manned missions in Defence, HLS (Homeland Security), and commercial applications as their price goes down, their capabilities improve, and regulation for them eases.
However, said UAVs, whether a 20 lbs class-1 multi-copter or a 150 lbs class-3 fixed-wing UAV rely almost entirely on GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) for the most basic of functionality required for navigation, particularly for BVLOS (Beyond Visual Line Of Sight) and autonomous operations.
Due to the weak and vulnerable nature of the GNSS signal, it is extremely susceptible to jamming attacks which today could be carried out from large distances using a $50 jammer bought online. UAV developers or end-users currently try to solve this problem either by creating “safe landing protocols” in GNSS-challenged environments or by adding various types of sensors (e.g., LiDAR, optical, etc.) to their flight controllers which provide, only in some scenarios, a reasonable source of positioning data. The problem is that they do not work in many situations such as when flying too high, too low, too fast, fog, darkness, above sea and other such scenarios.
The Robust Navigation System, jointly developed by Honeywell and infiniDome, solves the above-mentioned problem.
By tightly pairing the GNSS-based UAV-tailored Honeywell’s Compact Inertial Navigation System (HCINS) with infiniDome’s GNSS anti-jamming technology (GPSdome), integrated with Honeywell’s Radar-based Velocity System (HRVS) Robust Navigation System is a holistic solution that could be installed on almost any UAV providing it with continuous, accurate navigation data in GNSS-challenged or fully GNSS-denied environments.
The goal of the demonstration o Prove the Robust Navigation System capabilities in maintaining autonomous navigation operation for multi-copters under different GPS/GNSS jamming scenarios
Attendees o Israeli defence primes, drone and UAV companies and government end-users. The testing setup o Testing range in the center of Israel o 2 military-grade directional jammers (different types & band widths) The system under test o Customized version of the Osprey Hexa-copter
o Flight controller: PixHawk 2.1 Cube Black GPS 1 input – Here2 standard GNSS receiver + antenna module GPS 2 input – Robust Navigation System ( GPSdome 1.03 + HCINS + HRVS)
Demo purpose
o Regular, unprotected UAV, when faced with military-grade jammers, within 3-5 seconds, loses GNSS accuracy, tilts at an aggressive angle and takes off in seconds. The only way to avoid it drifting kilometers away and eventually crashing, is by assuming manual control and visually bringing the UAV back. o In this demo, our goal was to show that the UAV, under a GPS challenged environment (single direction of jamming) and fully denied environment (multiple directions of powerful jamming), can perform BVLOS and autonomous tasks accurately and safely without needing to assume manual control of the UAV. Each test was designed to be more difficult than its predecessor and would be executed only if the previous one was successful. The intention was to find the barrier at which the system fails.
Course of the test
o The first test was maintaining the UAV height (AltHold), position (PosHold) and Loiter autonomously under the above-mentioned jamming conditions. o Once proved, we planned to perform a simple point-to-point autonomous task under the same jamming conditions, o Then, perform a full autonomous task including executing a 10-point polygon and returning to the same position accurately under the same jamming conditions.
o Finally, the test was performing the lift-off, executing the full polygon described above, and landing under jamming conditions from before lift-off. o Sanity check: the Robust Navigation System was disconnected, leaving the UAV unprotected, in simple loitering mode, a single jammer was operated, the UAV aggressively drifted off in seconds, only to be stopped and controlled manually by the operator.
Results and conclusions
o The UAV, protected by the Robust Navigation System solution, passed all planned tests and proved that in GNSS-challenged environment and even in full GNSS-denied environment, the UAV can not only safely land or return home, but it can also complete its BVLOS / Autonomous mission.
About infiniDome
The GPS Security Company provides front-end cyber solutions for drones, fleets, and critical infrastructure assets making the next generation of unmanned autonomy safe. InfiniDome’s GPS protection solutions are tailored for defending GPS systems that rely on weak and vulnerable signals, making them highly susceptible to jamming and spoofing attacks. InfiniDome is disrupting the anti-jamming market by delivering the industry’s first non-military anti-jamming solution designed for small commercial applications.
About Honeywell Aerospace
Honeywell Aerospace products and services are found on virtually every commercial, defense and space aircraft. The Aerospace business unit builds aircraft engines, cockpit and cabin electronics, wireless connectivity systems, mechanical components and more. It’s hardware and software solutions create more fuel-efficient aircraft, more direct and on-time flights and safer skies and airports.
For more information, visit www.honeywell.com or follow us at @Honeywell_Aero.
About Easy Aerial
Easy Aerial is the leading provider of autonomous drone-based monitoring solutions for government, enterprise, and defense applications. Easy Aerial’s unique free-flight tethered, and optionally tethered drone-in-a-box systems are payload agnostic, fully autonomous, modular, portable, and rugged, with the ability to operate in the most adverse weather conditions. They can be deployed anywhere for many mission-critical applications such as perimeter and border security, event monitoring, first responder support, agriculture monitoring, industrial inspection, and tactical military manoeuvres without the need for a human operator. Easy Aerial is an ISO9001 and AS9100 certified company founded in 2015 with headquarters in Brooklyn, New York, and regional offices in Tel-Aviv, Israel, and Belgrade, Serbia.
infiniDome Highlights Technology Behind GPS Jamming Systems, Countermeasures 
