Flying back from Miami last week I put my life in the hands of two strangers, just because they wore gold epaulets. These aviators, in turn, trusted their onboard computers to safely navigate the passengers home. The computers accessed satellite global positioning data to set the course. This chain of command is very fragile, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) reported last month an increased level of GPS spoofing and Signal jamming since the outbreak of the wars in Ukraine and Israel. The alarming rise of nefarious activity could have catastrophic outcomes for commercial flights everywhere. For example, last September OPS Group reported a European flight en route to Dubai almost entered into Iranian airspace (with no clearance). In 2020, Iran shot down an uncleared passenger aircraft that entered its territory. This has made the major airlines, avionic manufacturers, and NATO militaries and governments scramble to find solutions.

At ff Venture Capital, we recognize that GPS spoofing and jamming are fundamental problems for aerial, terrestrial, and marine autonomous systems in moving the industry forward. This investment thesis is grounded on a simple belief that the deployment of cost-effective uncrewed systems requires the trust of human operators who can’t afford to question the data. When machines go awry so does the industry, just ask Cruise! This conviction led us to invest in Locus Lock, an innovative software approach to GNSS signal processing using radio frequency, at a fraction of the cost of comparable hardware solutions sold by military contractors. Last week, I sat down with its founder Hailey Nichols, a former University of Texas researcher in the school’s famed Radionavigation Laboratory.

Nichols explains her transition from academic to founder: “I was always enthralled with the idea of aerospace and went and studied at MIT, where I was obsessed with the control and robotic side of aerospace. After I graduated, I went and worked at Aurora Flight Sciences, which is a subsidiary of Boeing, and I was a UAV software engineer.” At Aurora, she focused on integrating suites of sensors (lidar, GPS, radar, computer vision, etc.) on autonomous aerial vehicles. However, Nichols quickly became frustrated with the costs and quality of the sensors, “They were physically heavy, power intensive, and it made it quite hard for engineers to integrate… this problem frustrated me so much that I went back to grad school to study it further, and I joined a lab down at the University of Texas.” In Austin, the roboticist saw a different approach to sensor data, using software for signal processing. As she elaborates, “The radio navigation lab was very highly specialized in signal processing, specifically bringing in advanced software algorithms and robust estimation techniques forward to sensor technology. This enabled more precise, secure, and reliable data, like positioning, navigation, and timing.” Her epiphany came when she saw the market demand for the lab’s GNSS receiver from the Department of Defense, and other commercial partners after Locus Lock’s published research on autonomous vehicles accurately navigating urban canyons.

Today, Locus Lock is ready to market its product more widely for dual-use applications across the spectrum of autonomy for commercial and defense use cases. In the words of Nichols, “Current GPS receivers often fail in what’s called urban multipath, this is where there’s building interference and shrouding of the sky can cause positioning errors. This can be problematic for autonomous cars, drones, and outdoor robotics that need access to centimeter-level positioning to make safe and informed decisions about where they are on the road or in the sky.” The RF engineer continued, “Our other applicable industry is defense tech. With the rise of the Ukraine conflict and the Israel conflict in the Middle East, we’ve seen a massive amount of deliberate interference. So bad actors that are either spoofing or jamming, causing major outages or disruptions in GPS positioning.” Locus Lock solves this issue by enabling its GPS processing suite as a software solution, and unlike hardware, it’s affordable and extremely flexible. As the founder elaborates, “The ability to be backward compatible and future proof where we can constantly update and evolve our GPS processing suite to evolving attack vectors ensures that our customers are given the most cutting edge and up-to-date processing techniques to enable centimeter-level positioning globally.” She continued to share Locus Lock’s defining advantage over existing products, “So our GNSS receivers are software-defined radio (SDR) with a specialized variant of inertially aided RTK. What that means is we’re doing some advanced sensor fusion techniques with GNSS signals in addition to inertial navigation to ensure that even in these pockets of urban canyons where you may not have access to GNSS signals to allow the GPS receiver to still provide centimeter-level positioning.” As Nichols likes to boast, Locus Lock is an enabler of “next generation autonomous mobility.”

While traditional GPS component manufacturers cost tens of thousands of dollars (around $40,000), Locus Lock is able today to deliver its proprietary software solution (with a 2-inch board) for a fraction of the costs (around $2,000). Today, centimeter accuracy is inaccessible to most robot companies as the marketplace for robust hardware is mostly from military contractors, including L3Harris Technologies, BAE Systems, Northrop Grumman, and Elbit Systems. In responding to the competition, Nichols stated “We’ve specifically made sure to cater our solution towards more low-cost environments that can proliferate mass market autonomy and robotics into the ecosystem.” She further advanced the flexibility of her GNSS receiver in pulling in data from global and regional satellite constellations. “Giving us more access to any signals in the sky at any given time. Diversity is also increasingly important in next-generation GPS receivers because it allows the device to evade jammed or afflicted channels,” exclaims the startup founder. Grand View Research estimates that the current SDR solutions market will climb to nearly $50 billion by 2030. As more uncrewed systems proliferate, Locus Lock’s price point will also come down in value. Nichols reflects: “And while there are some companies that have progressed their autonomy stacks to be quite high, they haven’t gotten their prices down to make sense in a mass market scenario. And so it’s crucial to enable this next generation of autonomous mobility at large to not compromise on performance but to be able to provide this at an affordable price. Locus Lock is providing high-end performance at a much lower price point.” She even predicted that they could eventually get their solution to under a thousand dollars, if not less, with more adoption.

Recently, Tesla published on X the latest video of their Optimus Robot moving fluidly at an incredible (robot) gait. Pitchbook recently predicted that this could be a breakout period for humanoids with now 84 leading companies having raised over $4.6 billion. At the same time, the prospect of these advanced machines being hijacked via GPS spoofing into the service of terrorists or rogue governments is very real and horrifying. Thankfully, Nichols and her team are working diligently with the Department of Defense: “A lot of this work has been done in spoofing and jamming not only detection but also mitigation. We detect the type of RF environment that we are operating in to mitigate it and inform that end user with the situational awareness that is needed to assess ongoing attacks. In addition, we can iterate much faster and bring in world-class experts on security and encryption to ensure that we protect secure military signals as much as possible. Our software can find assured reception that is demanded by these increasingly expensive and important assets that the military needs to protect.” In ffVC’s view, our newest portfolio company is mission critical to operating drones, robots, and other autonomous vessels safely, affordably, and securely in an increasingly dangerous world.

Tesla’s Optimus Robot Achieves New Milestones in Mobility and Task Efficiency

Advanced Mobility Showcased:
Tesla’s latest clip of the Optimus humanoid robot demonstrates significant advancements in fluid mobility, as the robot is seen taking smooth strides within a testing… pic.twitter.com/hMlq2w3tQ7

— Tesla Pablo (@pablo9948967714) February 25, 2024

Reprinted by permission.