At Eurosatory 2026, one of the themes echoing across exhibition halls packed with armored vehicles, autonomous systems, and electronic warfare technologies was that the era of uncontested satellite navigation is over. Growing threats include jamming, spoofing, and signal obstruction, and companies throughout the PNT ecosystem are searching for new ways to deliver resilience.
For Inertial Labs, the Virginia-based inertial navigation specialist acquired by VIAVI Solutions in 2025, that challenge has become the central driver of product development.
Speaking to Inside GNSS in Paris, Inertial Labs Sales Engineer Jackson Williams said his company has spent more than two decades refining inertial technologies while steadily expanding into sensor fusion and assured navigation. “We’re kind of a 25-year overnight success,” he quipped. The company started in 2001, based in Northern Virginia. “We also have manufacturing in Rapid City, South Dakota, and another R&D office in Kiev, Ukraine,” Williams said.
Over the past two decades, the company has evolved from a sensor manufacturer into a provider of complete navigation solutions. At the heart of that portfolio are gyroscopes and accelerometers, the foundational sensors that measure rotational and linear motion. Those are integrated into inertial measurement units (IMUs), which then form the basis of increasingly sophisticated inertial navigation systems.
Core competence
Williams summarized the company’s mission simply: “We do GPS&I, that is GPS plus inertial navigation, for autonomous vehicles. Starting with the base level sensors, we build our IMUs, and then create more complex inertial navigation systems out of those.” That focus has naturally led the company toward sensor fusion, using further data sources to constrain drift and improve overall navigation performance.
“Our main selling point and our kind of specialty is sensor fusion,” Williams said. “So we bring in aiding forms of data, such as air data computers, magnetometers for heading, fiber optic and man-time use, and low Earth constellation satellites for assured position and navigation and timing.”
Multiple aiding sources help constrain inertial drift and improve solution integrity. By fusing diverse, independent measurements, Inertial Labs seeks to maintain navigation performance in degraded environments, a sensor-diversity approach that Williams described as central to the company’s strategy.
“We bring in things like radio as well, line of sight, time of flight, time of arrival data,” he said. “We fuse these all together, curate them to our customers’ requirements, specifications, and support them when they’re on. We like to be very hands-on with our projects.”
Where it matters
Electronic warfare systems deployed particularly in Ukraine have demonstrated how vulnerable GNSS signals can be to interference. Modern assured-PNT architectures increasingly depend on multiple complementary sensors working together.
One example of a key aiding source is Inertial Labs’ miniature Air Data Computer (ADC). Designed for low size, weight and power consumption, the ADC provides airspeed, altitude and atmospheric measurements that can be fused with inertial data. For unmanned aircraft operating in dynamic flight conditions, those measurements provide an additional reference that helps maintain navigation accuracy during GNSS degradation or loss.
The war in Ukraine has also had a direct influence on product development. Inertial Labs’ Kiev office, originally established in 2006 as a conventional R&D center, now plays an important role in testing and validation. The value of that operational feedback has been significant. “All of our products are battlefield tested and qualified, vetted through our people in Ukraine,” he said. “And with everything that’s going on there, we’re getting a lot of feedback. That’s been a large factor in driving our innovation and our improvements in our devices.”
For many of the companies we met at Eurosatory, the war in Ukraine has become an unprecedented laboratory for navigation technologies. GNSS denial, electronic attack and contested electromagnetic environments have shifted inertial navigation from a backup capability to a central component of military positioning architectures.
Partnering in space
The emphasis on multiple, complementary navigation sources is also reflected in Inertial Labs’ work with the Iridium company. Iridium operates a global low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellite constellation whose signals are increasingly being explored for resilient PNT applications. LEO-PNT satellites operating in low Earth orbit transmit significantly stronger signals than traditional medium-Earth-orbit GNSS constellations. Inertial Labs’ partnership with Iridium emerged publicly in 2026 with the introduction of IRINS, a system that combines Inertial Labs’ tactical-grade inertial sensors with Iridium’s LEO satellite capabilities.
Despite defense dominating current demand, Williams emphasized that commercial applications remain important. “Right now our main market obviously is the defense space and things of that nature,” he said. “But our IMUs are industrial grade up to tactical grade, so there is a portfolio, or a space in the portfolio for your commercial base use cases.”
He pointed specifically to the company’s LiDAR payload business. “That payload is called RESEPI and is used primarily in the commercial space, meaning farming, construction, things of that nature,” Williams said. Whatever the application, whether it’s about supporting battlefield autonomy, or infrastructure mapping and precision agriculture, the underlying requirement remains the same: reliable motion sensing and navigation in challenging environments.
Eurosatory 2026 showed clearly what our readers already knew – assured PNT is now a necessity rather than a specialized capability. Listening to Williams, a consistent case emerged: the future of navigation will not depend on a single sensor, signal or satellite constellation, but will require the ability to combine and interweave the widest available selection of them.
