Pendulum to expand Navigate to drones with new U.S. Air Force contract

A consistent and dependable source of truth in operations across land, sea, and sky is critical to warfighters’ success. Real-time visibility into Assured Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (APNT) – available to them within an arm’s reach – remains a crucial part of that, especially in situations where GPS reliability is not guaranteed. 

We’re therefore pleased to announce that Pendulum has deepened its ties with the United States Air Force and signed an additional contract to expand its use of our Navigate ecosystem to small Unmanned Aerial System (sUAS) drone devices. 

This latest development builds on our existing work integrating Navigate – our AI-powered APNT solution for GPS-denied environments – into wearables such as smart watches, phones, and other ATAK devices, to enable offline navigation at the edge.  

The contract is yet another milestone in our mission to create an accessible, reliable alternative PNT ecosystem for improved situation awareness – all within a warfighters’ existing range of hardware devices and software applications. 

It follows two Navigate contracts that were also announced in September, awarded to Pendulum by AFWERX in partnership with the United States Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and Air Force Special Operation Command (AFSOC). 

Navigate enables APNT in challenging mission-critical environments, such as when signals are jammed, spoofed, or subjected to direct attacks or cyber attacks, as well as when operations are hampered by atmospheric or landscape conditions. 

In recent field tests sanctioned by the US government, Navigate proved reliable to within 20 meters in environments where GPS was subject to jamming.

Today, it securely integrates into the Android Team Awareness Kit (ATAK) – the geospatial infrastructure application used by dismounted military and civilian personnel, through a collaborative effort with the AFRL. 

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Navigate Use Cases

As a part of our efforts to scale the commercial application of our geolocation technologies – we’re increasingly looking for further applications for Navigate – in both military and commercial contexts. 

Those who partake in outdoor recreational activities frequently use navigation applications to avoid challenging terrain, potential obstacles, and property boundaries, as well as to measure progress, and ultimately navigate safely. Many existing applications heavily rely on GPS technologies, which are not always available in forested areas, mountains, or off the coast. 

Similarly, those in frontline roles such as firefighters, search and rescue teams, and disaster relief efforts are frequently confronted with reduced or denied GPS due to the remote nature of their work, atmospheric conditions, and other external interruptions.

We believe that our API-first approach to providing APNT through existing software tools and applications stands to improve the end-user's ability to map and track their location for more informed decisions in offline environments. 

If you’d like to learn more about Navigate or Pendulum, please send an email to navigate@pendulum.global.

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About Pendulum

Pendulum is an AI company that optimizes critical supply and demand networks. We make ubiquitous systems more intelligent, maximizing the impact of resources available. Pendulum products are deployed via APIs that navigate, predict demand, and optimize supply  - continuously and autonomously improving on their own.‍‍