HYDRA-NAV: Hierarchical Degradation-Resilient Autonomous Navigation

DESCRIPTION

A multi-modal navigation stack that gracefully degrades across 5 sensing tiers as electronic warfare intensifies. Tier 1 (permissive): full GPS+INS+visual SLAM. Tier 2 (GPS-contested): visual-inertial odometry with magnetic anomaly crosschecking. Tier 3 (GPS-denied): Doppler radar SLAM + barometric terrain matching using pre-loaded elevation maps. Tier 4 (visual-denied, smoke/dust/night): millimeter-wave radar + ultrasonic + inertial dead-reckoning with magnetic SLAM correction. Tier 5 (full EW saturation): pure inertial with pre-computed trajectory commitment and stigmergic waypoint following from swarm breadcrumbs. The key innovation is the DEGRADATION ARBITER — a lightweight neural classifier running on-drone that monitors sensor health scores in real-time and triggers graceful tier transitions without pilot input. Draws from submarine navigation (decades of GPS-denied ops), space systems (radiation-induced sensor failures), and biological organisms (insects navigating via multiple redundant cues: polarized light, magnetic fields, optical flow, celestial compass). No existing system combines all 5 tiers with automatic arbitration — current drones either have GPS or crash. This fills the critical delta between "works in a lab" and "works when Russia is jamming everything within 50km."

REASONING

HYDRA-NAV targets a critical gap in the current UAV market: the transition from laboratory SLAM to combat-ready resilience. While standard flight stacks (PX4/ArduPilot) handle GPS and basic VIO, they lack a unified arbitration layer for deep-tier degradation like magnetic SLAM or Doppler-based terrain matching. The primary defensibility lies in the integration complexity of unconventional sensors (mmWave, Doppler, Magnetic) and the 'Degradation Arbiter'—training a model to recognize specific EW signatures or sensor drifting in real-time is a non-trivial data science problem. Key competitors include Anduril (Lattice), Shield AI (Hivemind), and Skydio, all of whom are moving toward GPS-denied autonomy but often within closed-source, proprietary hardware ecosystems. The risk is high market consolidation among defense primes, but the 'frontier lab' risk is low as OpenAI/Google are unlikely to optimize for FPGA-based Doppler radar SLAM. The main technical hurdle is the SWaP-C (Size, Weight, Power, and Cost) of running all five tiers simultaneously.

COMPOSABILITY