Before the advent of GPS, especially at sea, navigation meant finding your position by looking up at the stars. Today, when the Global Positioning System isn’t working—or gets jammed by electronic warfare—drones are learning to do something similar, orienting themselves by looking down at the Earth instead. This concept underpins a growing wave of efforts to use cameras, sensors, and AI to keep drones “aware” of their surroundings, allowing them to complete their missions or pursue their targets without the use of GPS, or even any communication signal. This week satellite giant Maxar entered the fray with Raptor, a suite of software that can determine a drone’s position on the planet by matching its camera feed with the company’s giant collection of 3D Earth data. The system began taking shape about a year ago, says Peter Wilczynski, chief product officer at Maxar Intelligence. By then, he says, “it reached a fever pitch of people in defense realizing that all of a sudden, all of these systems that had been designed with GPS would not work in a modern battle space.”

Full report : Maxar’s detailed digital Earth joins a growing AI push to help robots orient themselves in the face of GPS attacks.