UAV Navigation–Grupo Oesía is extending its footprint in Europe’s tactical UAS market, with its flight control and GNSS-resilient navigation stack now integrated on the ZEUS fixed-wing VTOL family developed by Poland-based Ekolot Aerospace & Defense (EAD).
The collaboration pairs UAV Navigation’s guidance, navigation and control (GNC) suite—including its GNSS-denied navigation solution—with a modular airframe designed to bridge the gap between small tactical UAVs and larger MALE-class systems. ZEUS airframes support MTOWs from roughly 150–250 kg in VTOL configuration and up to 350 kg in CTOL guise, with payloads up to 150 kg on the long-endurance ZEUS G variant and mission durations quoted in the 12–24 hour range.
The family integrates UAV Navigation’s advanced autopilot and navigation stack, engineered to maintain precise control and position in contested RF environments where GNSS jamming, spoofing or simple unavailability are assumed rather than treated as edge cases.
GNSS-Denied Navigation as a Design Baseline
At the core of the ZEUS integration is UAV Navigation–Grupo Oesía’s GNSS-Denied Navigation Kit, which combines the company’s POLAR-300 attitude and heading reference system (AHRS) with the VNS01 Visual Navigation System.
POLAR-300 supplies high-reliability inertial navigation with integrated air data, enabling dead-reckoning navigation with low drift over mission-relevant time horizons. The VNS01 overlays visual navigation on top of that inertial baseline: an onboard camera builds an internal map of the environment during GNSS-available portions of flight, then uses visual odometry and scene matching to bound drift when satellites are denied or compromised.
Documentation for the kit highlights several features that are directly relevant to ZEUS’s intended operational envelope:
- Dead-reckoning with minimal drift, with error growth held to low single-digit percentages over distance in GNSS-denied segments.
- Integrated jamming and spoofing detection, enabling the system to treat suspect GNSS as another sensor to be weighted or discarded rather than a single point of failure.
- No requirement for pre-loaded terrain maps, simplifying deployment into new theatres and reducing pre-mission data handling.
- Compact form factor and defined interfaces for integration with third-party flight control computers, although in the ZEUS case the kit is tied into UAV Navigation’s own autopilot stack.
This combination of inertial and vision-based navigation is part of a broader trend in resilient PNT: pushing more autonomy into the vehicle so that GNSS can be treated as an aid, not a crutch, especially for NATO Category I/II UAS operating near peer adversaries.
GNSS Resilience for Eastern Flank Missions
ZEUS is clearly aimed at missions where GNSS resilience is not optional. The platform is marketed for ISR, border surveillance, defense and civil protection roles “in remote or challenging environments,” and the initial focus markets are Poland and the wider LATAM region.
For Poland, which sits on NATO’s eastern flank and has accelerated investment in both UAS and counter-UAS capabilities in response to Russian operations in Ukraine, the ability to sustain navigation through deliberate interference is now a baseline requirement rather than a premium option. A 150 kg–class payload, 12–24 hour endurance and modular VTOL/CTOL configuration only realize their value if the aircraft can maintain trusted position and attitude when satellite-based PNT is degraded or denied.
This is not UAV Navigation–Grupo Oesía’s first move in the GNSS-resilient space. The company has separately partnered with GNSS vendors such as Septentrio to integrate RTK and anti-spoofing capabilities, positioning itself as a GNC house that treats resilient GNSS and GNSS-denied operation as a continuum rather than separate design paths.
A Platform for Further Variants
The current integration is on the ZEUS VTOL configuration, but both companies flag this as the starting point for a broader roadmap. The same GNC and GNSS-denied navigation suite is expected to migrate across to the CTOL ZEUS G and ZEUS CTOL variants, which push further into long-endurance, high-payload territory.
As Ekolot’s CEO Edgardo Zapata put it in announcing the partnership, the company sees flight control and navigation as “one of the most critical components” of the platform and is betting on that layer as a source of mission assurance and export credibility.
