Taiwanese aerospace firm partners with Maxar on GPS-alternative drone navigation

WASHINGTON — Maxar Intelligence announced a deal with one of Taiwan’s largest aerospace and defense contractors to supply its drone-navigation tool for use across Taiwan’s unmanned aerial vehicle industry.

Taiwan’s Aerospace Industrial Development Corporation (AIDC) said it will deploy the Maxar Raptor software across Taiwan’s unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) industry, in an effort to improve the reliability of autonomous systems in electronic-denied environments where there is no access to GPS or other navigation satellite systems.

Maxar’s Raptor is a vision-based software suite that enables autonomous drones to navigate and extract accurate ground coordinates in the absence of GPS. It provides a terrain-based positioning system for drones in GPS-denied environments by leveraging detailed 3D models created from Maxar’s satellite imagery.

Instead of using satellite signals, a drone equipped with Raptor compares its real-time camera feed with a pre-existing 3D terrain model to determine its position and orientation. 

Maxar said Raptor can operate at night and in low-altitude flight operations without the need for any additional hardware.

Concerns about GPS jamming

The partnership, announced Sept. 18, comes as military and civilian aircraft operators worldwide grapple with the increasing sophistication of GPS jamming and spoofing capabilities that can render conventional satellite navigation unreliable or completely unavailable during combat operations.

The agreement follows a successful field demonstration of Raptor software in Taiwan earlier this year, according to Maxar, in which the test platform was able to maintain precise navigation under GPS-denied conditions using only its native camera and Maxar’s software.

“Taiwan is rapidly building one of the most advanced UAV industries in the world,” said Anders Linder, general manager of international government at Maxar Intelligence.

AIDC, which makes UAVs for both military and civilian markets in Taiwan, is positioned to serve as a key distribution channel for the technology. 

Maxar said AIDC will drive the adoption of Raptor across Taiwan’s UAV suppliers and promote use of the software across the Taiwan Excellence Drone International Business Opportunity Alliance, an organization that AIDC chairs. This industry consortium includes Taiwanese drone manufacturers, component suppliers and technology developers to coordinate export strategies and technology sharing.

“We will jointly build a Taiwan-focused integration and testing center, highlight GPS-jamming resilience as a core differentiator, and unlock opportunities across Taiwan and the broader Asia market,” said AIDC President Chin-Ping Tsao.

Maxar Intelligence, based in Westminster, Colorado, operates a fleet of high-resolution imaging satellites that provide the foundational data for its terrain-mapping capabilities. The partnership with AIDC marks an expansion of Maxar’s defense technology offerings beyond traditional satellite imagery services.