Our navigation and control solution enables coordinated UAV–USV operations, supporting heterogeneous swarms, shared situational awareness, and cooperative behaviors across air and sea domains. It allows manufacturers to deploy scalable swarm and multi‑vehicle concepts using a common, proven control architecture.
Our system provides advanced detect‑and‑avoid capabilities equivalent to those proven in UAV operations and adapted to the maritime domain. By integrating AIS (Automatic Identification System) data, it enhances situational awareness and safely manages obstacles and vessel traffic, while dedicated mothership protection functions prevent collisions during approach, launch, and recovery operations.
The system enables loitering munition missions through advanced guidance laws, Optical Terminal Guidance, and compatibility with external seekers. These capabilities support high‑precision terminal engagement, delivering bullseye accuracy in demanding operational environments.
UAV Navigation has extensive experience in the UAV sector, providing flight control solutions for manufacturers of Fixed Wing Platforms, Rotary Wing Platforms and Target Drones since 2004. This strong UAV heritage underpins the development of common guidance, navigation, and control technologies across multiple domains.
The experience acquired in this field has allowed the company to develop also an advanced solution for unmanned or autonomous surface vehicles (USV or ASV), extending proven aerial autonomy concepts to maritime operations and enabling seamless UAV–USV interoperability.
UAV Navigation-Grupo Oesía's autopilots have been designed to comply with IP66, meaning that they are suitable for work in humid conditions, including salt spray and saline environments.
The autopilot is able to control a USV mission completely autonomously from start to finish, allowing operators to focus on higher‑level supervision or parallel tasks. The same advanced features that are available for aerial vehicles can be used by USV operators: multiple waypoints, multiple onboard mission plans (including intelligent 'return to base' via chosen routes in order to avoid particular areas), no-go zones, actions on waypoints, dynamic mission updates during execution, etc. A particularly useful feature is 'relative routes': the ability to install the Ground Control Station (GCS) on a moving ship, and then to fix a mission plan relative to the moving vessel.
Despite its small size and weight UAV Navigation-Grupo Oesía's product is a complete autopilot, meaning that the unit contains all of the sensors required to control the USV; only servos and an external datalink to communicate with the GCS are required. Additionally, thanks to the system’s interoperability, the GCS can be readily integrated with range telemetry facilities so that range personnel can be kept aware of the USV's and GCS' locations at all times.
It is important to note that the autopilot is fully autonomous. Unlike other control systems which rely on a datalink to work, the autopilot is able to execute a complete mission even if the datalink between the Ground Control Station and the USV fails, ensuring mission continuity in contested, remote, or communications‑degraded environments.
Special Features for Unmanned Surface Vehicles:
- Health monitoring. Considerable fault detection and survivability have been designed into the system; the aim is to ensure that the mission can continue in the event of individual or even multiple sensor failures while maintaining accurate estimates of speed, heading and position.
- Precise heading definition. Our experience in the aerospace sector has allowed us to resolve some of the most problematic issues in USV navigation, such as the heading definition without GPS or a dual GPS compass.
- Approach to the mothership protection: The system detects the proximity to the mothership and prevents any collision.
- Actions or conditional events on waypoints: Advanced actions can be assigned to specific waypoints, enabling automated behaviors such as speed changes, loitering patterns, sensor activation, payload actions, or mission logic execution during navigation.
- Multiple onboard mission plans: The system supports multiple mission plans stored onboard, allowing the USV to switch autonomously between predefined routes and behaviors depending on mission phase, operator commands, or contingency conditions.
- CAN interface available. The system provides a CAN interface for seamless integration with onboard subsystems, actuators, sensors, and third‑party equipment, enabling robust and deterministic communication within the USV platform.
- AIS integration: Native AIS integration enhances situational awareness by incorporating maritime traffic data and supporting navigational behaviors aligned with COLREG principles (International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea), enabling safer operations alongside manned vessels in shared and congested maritime environments.
- Turn over protection. The autopilot will detects if the USV capsizes and is able to carry out immediate safety procedures (e.g. engine kill).
- Sail, No-Sail Zones. Configure restricted zones. In the event of sailing into a zone, the operator will receive a warning.
- Algorithms to minimize the effect of the waves on vessel performance.
- Compact unit. No Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) or Mission Management Computer are required - they are integrated within the same box.
