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Session E12: Complementary or Alternative PNT: Optimization for Operationalization

Honeywell Alternative Navigation Architecture: Demonstrated Resiliency of Multi-Modality PNT in GNSS Contested Environments
Andrea Walker, Kevin Sweeney, Derrick Johnson, Corey Knutson, Brian Schipper, Honeywell Aerospace
Date/Time: Wednesday, Jun. 3, 4:25 p.m.

Honeywell Alternative Navigation Architecture (HANA) is a platform-agnostic software solution designed to ensure resilient navigation for crewed and uncrewed aircraft in environments where Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals are degraded, jammed or spoofed. For the warfighter, an assured PNT solution resilient through GNSS degradation is mission-critical in contested environments. HANA is designed to provide a mission-customizable PNT solution tailored to the target platform requirements and CONOPS.
HANA fuses input from existing aircraft sensors together with alternative aiding sources to create a multi-system navigation platform, independent of the underlying computers and systems. HANA currently includes three aiding modalities: (1) vision-aided navigation, using live camera feeds to match ground imagery with map databases, (2) magnetic anomaly-aided navigation, detecting known variations in Earth’s magnetic field, and (3) Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite navigation, offering stronger, lower-altitude signals more resistant to jamming. Additional modalities are also available for the desired missionization profile, including light detection and ranging (LiDAR), radar, radios, and star trackers.
With this layered architecture designed with Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE), HANA can mix and match modalities to meet mission-specific requirements, ensuring maximum resilience, system integrity and consistent availability through GNSS denied environments. Further, HANA’s modular architecture facilitates customizability to customer needs, with flexibility on desired transport and computing platform.
HANA features Honeywell's magnetic anomaly-aided navigation (MagNav) technology to maintain PNT resiliency no matter the time of day, terrain, weather, or altitude. The robust nature of magnetic field anomalies in the Earth's crust provides a high-quality navigation signal that can complement LEO, vision, and GNSS PNT solutions. Advancements in sensor noise reduction, error modelling, magnetic map creation, and flight testing make Honeywell a leader in MagNav technologies. By itself, Honeywell's MagNav solution can achieve better than 125-meter 2D RMSE during a multi-hour GNSS-denied flight. With the additional configurable sensing modalities of HANA, MagNav ensures a trustworthy PNT solution even during highly restrictive CONOPS.
HANA also incorporates Honeywell's integrated LEO RF PNT capability providing PNT updates worldwide at any time of day, terrain, weather, or altitude. Because signals from LEO satellites are much stronger, LEO RF PNT provides significantly more resilience to RF interference compared to GNSS. The Honeywell LEO RF PNT capability currently utilizes the Iridium satellite constellation PNT signal and has demonstrated sub-50m 2D RMSE performance in mobile ground and flight testing. Furthermore, Honeywell Iridium PNT is self-initializing, requiring no initialization from other sensors. The limitless operating range and reliable accuracy of LEO RF PNT makes it a key element of HANA.
In addition to the MagNav and LEO RF modalities, HANA implements Vision Aided Navigation (VAN), comparing a live camera feed to a reference map database. Robust to map staleness and time of day variations, VAN provides absolute position updates, which further hardens HANA’s resiliency to jamming and spoofing. Pairing HANA with an IR camera, VAN demonstrates day or night GNSS-like performance over land, across the range of low to high altitudes. For missions over water or with weather occlusions, VAN blends seamlessly with both MagNav and LEO RF PNT for a resilient multi-modal PNT solution. A keystone modality of HANA, Vision Aided Navigation provides GNSS-like performance.
Honeywell has recently demonstrated HANA through several missionizations on UAV platforms, fixed-wing aircraft, and rotorcraft, with CONOPS spanning low to high altitudes over land and water. This presentation demonstrates HANA performance across these various missionization scenarios, including results from APEX 2025 where a live GNSS contested environment was experienced.
During APEX 2025, HANA was demonstrated on the Honeywell Embraer E170 in the presence of live GNSS jamming and spoofing. When spoofed signals were encountered, the HANA software successfully rejected the adverse signals. Vision aided navigation maintained less than 10m 2D RMSE across all flights and contested GNSS environments with the HG5700 IMU, and an estimated 15m 2D RMSE with the HG1930 IMU. Additionally, the estimated navigation error from the second APEX flight decreased while using LEO measurements during periods of vision outages in clouds, successfully demonstrating the benefit of combining vision with LEO in a multi-modality alternative navigation solution.

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