PrecisionHawk and the University of Toronto today announced a collaboration to develop a solution for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in the event of GPS loss or jam. The partnership, named ‘Project Breadcrumb’, will facilitate safe UAV travel even when all other communications or navigations systems are lost. The objective will be to integrate directly into PrecisionHawk’s low altitude tracking and avoidance system, LATAS, for use on any UAV platform.

“As we work to mitigate the risk of operating small UAVs in the national airspace, one of the key concerns comes from the possibility of losing GPS signal or GPS interference,” said Ernest Earon, PrecisionHawk President and co-founder. “The University of Toronto has an excellent research history in navigation and control in GPS-denied environments, like space, where technology needs to know where it is and where it needs to go without a GPS signal.”

Project Breadcrumb will be developed in two phases by University of Toronto researchers and their students at the Institute for Aerospace Studies in partnership with PrecisionHawk’s experienced engineering team.