This year, AUSA arrives at a moment when soldiers, program managers and vehicle designers across the force confront the uncomfortable truth that GPS can no longer be trusted on the modern battlefield. ANELLO Photonics, a Silicon Valley venture-backed company, has spent the past several years building the answer. Its work with the Army and DoW now sits at the center of that conversation, backed by a growing list of federal awards that stretch well beyond its original research contracts.
Why GPS-Denied Navigation Matters for the Army
Dr. Mario Paniccia, CEO and co-founder of ANELLO Photonics, provided a candid assessment of the problem his company was built to solve. “Everything’s based on GPS today, but we’re finding from the Ukraine war, in Israel and now today with Epic Fury that GPS can easily be jammed, easily be spoofed.” he said.
That vulnerability does not stay confined to the front line. Jamming and spoofing bleed into surrounding commercial activity. They disrupt everything from delivery drivers to logistics fleets that happen to operate near contested zones.
For Army platforms, the stakes run higher. A ground vehicle, a fixed-wing intelligence asset or a small drone that loses its satellite fix in the middle of a mission does not just lose accuracy; it loses the ability to complete that mission altogether.
Paniccia described the failure mode. “Drones fly today, perfect sky, everything’s great. The minute it loses GPS the drone doesn’t know what to do. It can’t return home. It doesn’t know where home is,” he warned.
The SiPhOG Technology Behind ANELLO’s Army Programs
ANELLO’s answer starts with a component the company calls SiPhOG,TM short for Silicon Photonics Optical Gyroscope. Paniccia explained that navigation technology historically has been split into two camps. High-end fiber optic gyros deliver gold-standard precision but come in large coffee-can-sized, or often larger packages that can cost between fifty thousand and two hundred thousand dollars, a price and footprint that rules out mass deployment. Camera-based visual navigation offers a cheaper alternative, but it fails in the environments where soldiers actually operate.
“It works great if you have clear skies,” Paniccia explained, “but it doesn’t work over water where you don’t have features, doesn’t work over snow, doesn’t work over sand.”
ANELLO SiPhOG closes that gap. The technology shrinks all the fiber gyro’s optical components, the same class of hardware found in fighter jets and intercontinental ballistic missiles, onto a photonic chip measuring roughly two millimeters by five millimeters. That chip carries all the optical components that are found in a fiber optic gyroscope. This chip then gets assembled with other electronics and components using pick-and-place manufacturing borrowed from the semiconductor industry, the same high-volume process that has made computer chips cheap and ubiquitous today.
Paniccia called the result “the world’s smallest optical gyro.” It matches fiber gyro precision while eliminating moving parts and drastically cutting size, weight and power.
To be clear, ANELLO did not reinvent the underlying physics. “It’s not that we created the fiber gyro,” Paniccia noted. “We’ve taken the fiber gyro physics and performance, put it into a small form factor, essentially put a fiber gyro on a chip, which allows you to bring that kind of precision capability to the mass market.”
All of this matters for Army buyers evaluating risk. The performance envelope has been well proven and can scale. ANELLO changed the ability to manufacture that performance at the volume defense programs that increasingly are demanding volume and scale for applications like swarming drones, attritable aircraft and distributed ground robotics.
From Chip to Fieldable Navigation System
That progression also tracks with how ANELLO packages its technology for platform integration. A single palm-sized unit containing three SiPhOGs, triple-redundant MEMS IMU sensors, accelerometers, magnetometer, barometers and temperature sensors functions as an inertial measurement unit (IMU) on its own. Add a GPS receiver, a processor and sensor fusion algorithms, and the same architecture becomes a full inertial navigation system (INS).
Paniccia noted that the system checks its position against GPS every ten milliseconds, a constant comparison that allows it to detect jamming or spoofing the moment a satellite signal turns unreliable. The navigation system also supports triple-band L1, L2 and L5 GPS, encrypted military positioning codes, and will soon support Starshield and Starlink connectivity, and other LEO alt-PNT solutions.
How the Army SBIR Program Turned Into Fielded Results
The Army has not watched ANELLO from the sidelines. The service awarded ANELLO a Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) contract in 2023 to demonstrate sensor fusion technology compliant with the C5ISR and Electronic Warfare Modular Open Suite of Standards (MOSA) for armored vehicle navigation.
In November 2024, the Army followed with an eighteen-month Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract tied to its xTechSearch 7 competition, which enabled ANELLO to demonstrate its optical gyroscope and AI-based sensor fusion engine directly to Army evaluators. “Within this program, the U.S. Army can directly evaluate and experience first-hand the benefits of the ANELLO products for navigation in GPS-denied or contested environments,” Paniccia said when that award was announced.
That Phase II award carried a specific mission: a handheld inertial navigation system built for dismounted soldiers operating in contested environments without GPS. The underlying effort progressed from a Phase I contract worth roughly two hundred fifty thousand dollars to a Phase II award worth approximately 1.8 million dollars. ANELLO designed the resulting unit to fit in the palm of a hand, hold walking error of 2 to 3 percent of distance traveled, in their first prototype unit while finding true north in under 30 seconds. ANELLO believes that the next revision will show even better performance.
The APFIT Award That Signals Army Confidence Paid Off
A bigger milestone landed more recently and outside the Army’s budget line, though it leans directly on the Army’s earlier validation. In January 2026, the Department of War (DoW) selected ANELLO for a 20-million-dollar award under the Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies program (APFIT), a mechanism built specifically to push mature, mission-ready technologies into production at scale rather than fund additional research. The department’s own announcement credited ANELLO’s selection to “a strong track record of defense wins, including U.S. Navy Phase I and U.S. Army Phase II SBIR awards as well as other design wins validating its GPS-denied navigation technology across contested and mission-critical environments.”
Paniccia framed the award as validation of the path his company charted years earlier. “This award marks an important step in bringing GPS-independent navigation to the forefront of operational autonomy,” he said. “With the support of our Navy and Marine Corps partners, we’re accelerating the deployment of mission-ready technologies that redefine performance in GPS-denied environments.”
The APFIT funding flows through Navy and Marine Corps sponsorship rather than the Army directly, but the sequencing matters for anyone tracking ANELLO’s Army relationship. The Army’s Phase II SBIR helped build the credibility record that unlocked a cross-service production contract nearly nine times larger than the SBIR award itself.
Flight Data That Demonstrates Combat-Relevant Accuracy
Numbers carry weight in defense procurement. Paniccia offered figures from real flight testing rather than laboratory projections. In one test, a Cessna carrying ANELLO’s aerial INS flew more than 300 kilometers at 182 knots, while executing barrel rolls, 360-degree turns and altitude changes. The test results for running the flight on pure inertial navigation with no GPS, no cameras and no visual aiding. “The error from start to finish at the end was about one percent, or 99 percent accurate,” Paniccia said.
A separate defense-related test, which Paniccia could not attribute to a named customer, pushed a fixed-wing platform through a simulated jamming region that spanned 20 to 80 kilometers. The mission profile mirrored a real operational sequence. It included hours of GPS-enabled flight followed by a jammed final approach where the aircraft still needed to close within a tight target radius for either an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance mission or a kinetic one. “We flew this with about 98.5 percent accuracy, no cameras, nothing else, pure ANELLO,” he said.
Paniccia also described how quickly ANELLO can integrate into a new platform. The company sends a field application engineer (FAE) to fly directly to a customer’s aircraft, ground vehicle or vessel, installs ANELLO into their system, collects data on the first day, sends the data back to HQ, the algo team tunes the algorithms overnight and returns updated modifications and improvements to the FAE team the next day. Across air, land and maritime platforms, he said, that turnaround consistently has been delivering roughly one percent positional accuracy in GPS-denied conditions for every customer, in just a few days.
What ANELLO Offers Army Program Managers during AUSA Week
For Army modernization officials who descend on DC for AUSA week this year, ANELLO’s pitch centers on three qualities that matter most in acquisition decisions: proven precision, small form factor and manufacturable scale.
Ground vehicles benefit from a two-dimensional navigation problem that ANELLO says yields even tighter results than aerial platforms. “We’re actually getting about 0.2 percent error on our ground-based INS solution,” Paniccia said, describing performance over a hundred kilometers of driving from an ANELLO box compact enough to plug into a vehicle’s accessory power outlet.
Beyond raw performance, ANELLO frames its technology as dual use, serving both defense and industrial customers such as construction, agriculture and trucking. That dual-use posture lowers unit costs by spreading manufacturing volume across markets, an argument that resonates with Army sustainment officers focused on total ownership cost as much as unit performance.
With a validated handheld system from its Army SBIR, a Navy Phase I contract, and now 20 million dollars in DoW production funding, ANELLO enters this year’s AUSA week in Washington, D.C. with a materially stronger fielding story than it had when its Army contract was first announced.
Paniccia’s closing message to defense audiences is that resilience cannot be an afterthought. He urges program teams to build GPS-denied capability into platform design from the outset rather than having to retrofit them once jamming becomes an operational failure point. As soldiers increasingly train and fight in electromagnetic environments where satellite navigation cannot be assumed, ANELLO’s SiPhOG and INS products offer the Army a path toward navigation systems that keep working when the signal disappears, gets jammed or lies.
To learn more about ANELLO or schedule a meeting during AUSA, contact info@anellophotonics.com