The Next Chapter in Offline Navigation

Six billion assets now rely on fewer than 150 satellites. By the end of the decade, there will be double the smartphones, ten times the drones, and three-hundred-times more robots moving across Earth.

GPS gave us unprecedented autonomy, GPS also created unprecedented dependence. Trillions of dollars of economic activity now rely on these satellites. From daily tasks to emergency response and defending our national security, across every domain we now look to the stars to find our way here on Earth.

Nowhere is this more critical than with our armed forces. Originally built for military operations, today our national security is fundamentally tethered to GPS.

700 different U.S. weapons systems rely on this network of satellites and receivers. Today’s geopolitical landscape exposes the pitfalls of this dependence on a single source of positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT). With just one in twenty Excalibur missiles hitting their targets in the Ukraine war – electronic warfare is now the de facto operating environment - the rule, not the exception.

Vast portions of the planet are becoming blanketed with GNSS-interference. Eight-figure exquisite systems have been left redundant by off-the-shelf jammers and spoofers, now available on the dark web for just a few hundred dollars.

The White House recognized this blindspot in our defense arsenal – but even with executive orders to bolster GPS, the United States still does not have a scalable alternative. The shift to more secure M-Code-enabled satellites remains years behind schedule, and whether you look to the Arctic or the South China Sea, current and emerging adversaries are solving for the GNSS divide faster than the United States.

Potential solutions (LEO satellites, quantum clocks, and inertial navigation systems, and to name a few) remain too costly, complex, and too heavy for most devices – and the national heroes that depend on them.

The United States’ software advantage will be pivotal in bridging the divide. We believe in a new approach to ensuring PNT in GPS-denied and degraded settings. The Pendulum approach is governed by the principle that everything we do should be in the service of protecting those who put their lives on the line. Every warfighter needs to know their location; accurate geolocation is the foundation of modern operations, which we protect with new capabilities.

We are building a future for PNT that is software-defined and hardware-agnostic. That means using digital inputs, and those alone, to create assured geolocation – on any device, anywhere. Every consumer-grade device has in-built sensors for movement and navigation – our AI activates them so they can put assets and personnel on the map when and where traditional technologies fail.

There are  ten-and-a-half million people across the United States government, US first responder organizations, and allied nations whose lives depend on reliable geolocation – the need for a scalable solution has never been greater.

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Pendulum Navigate brings new PNT capabilities to the warfighter that are robust, reliable and scalable. It's a new paradigm in GPS-free navigation – a single, agnostic model that transforms any device into a lifesaving source of truth.

Every warfighter and autonomous asset must know precise location. A safe, autonomous future demands robust, reliable, and scalable geolocation - we're all in on ensuring that future.

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Benjamin Fels is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Pendulum Systems, a company focused on AI for software-defined, hardware agnostic geolocation (Alt-PNT).

Prior to Pendulum, Benjamin was a derivatives trader in Chicago and London, where he led teams that created and ran trading systems that learned in real-time across global financial markets. Benjamin has advised the World Health Organization on artificial intelligence, is an oped-contributor to the Financial Times, and has been invited to lecture on AI at universities across the United States.

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