ANELLO Photonics secures funding for inertial navigation in GPS-denied environments

Self-driving vehicles, mobile robots, and drones need multiple sensors for safe and reliable operation, but the cost and bulk of those sensors have posed challenges for developers and manufacturers. ANELLO Photonics Inc. yesterday said it has closed its Series B funding round for its SiPhOG inertial navigation system, or INS.

“This investment not only validates our SiPhOG technology and products in the marketplace, but will [also] allow us to accelerate our manufacturing and product development as we continue to push the boundaries and leadership for navigation capabilities and performance to our customers who want solutions for GPS-denied environments,” stated Dr. Mario Paniccia, co-founder and CEO of ANELLO Photonics.

Founded in 2018, ANELLO has developed SiPhOG — Silicon Photonics Optical Gyroscope — based on integrated photonic system-on-chip (SoC) technology. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company said it has more than 28 patents, with 44 pending. Its technologies also include a sensor-fusion engine using artificial intelligence.

“I spent 22 years at Intel and started this field of silicon photonics, which is the idea of building optical devices out of standard silicon processing, mostly focused on the data center,” recalled Paniccia. “Mike Horton, my co-founder, was a sensor gyro expert who started a company called Crossbow coming out of UC Berkeley.”

“Everyone doing autonomy was saying lidar and radar, but customers told Mike that if we could build an integrated photonic chip, they’d be very interested,” he told The Robot Report. “If you look at fiber gyros, they work great but are big, bulky, and expensive.”

“The stuff on our phones are MEMS [micro-electromechanical systems]-based today, which is not very accurate and is very sensitive to temperature, vibration, and EM interference,” Paniccia explained. “With the the same concept as a fiber gyro — the idea of light going around a coil, and you measure the phase based on rotation — we integrated all those components on a single chip, added a little laser, and put electronics around it, and you now get SiPhOG, which fits in the palm of your hand.”

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SiPhOG combines compactness and precision

SiPhOG brings high-precision into an integrated silicon photonics platform, claimed ANELLO. It is based on the interferometric fiber-optic gyroscope (FOG) but is designed for compactness, said Paniccia.

“It’s literally 2 by 5 mm,” he said. “On that chip, we have all the components — the splitters, the couplers, the phase modulators, and the delay lines. We measure about 50 nano-radians of signal, so a tiny, tiny signal, but we measure it very accurately.”

The system also has a non-ASIC, two-sided electronics board with an analog lock-in amplifier, a temperature controller, and an isolator, Paniccia said. It has none of the drawbacks of MEMS and uses 3.3 volts, he added.

Paniccia said the SiPhOG unit includes an optical gyro, triple-redundant MEMS, accelerometers, and magnetometers. It also has two GPS chips and dual antennas and is sealed to be waterproof.

Navigation system ready for multiple markets

Autonomous systems can work with ANELLO’s technology and the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) for navigation, positioning, and motion tracking for a range of applications, said the company.

“We’re shipping to customers now in orchards, where the leaves come in, and the water in them essentially acts like a tunnel, absorbing GPS,” Paniccia said. “Our algorithm says, ‘I’m losing GPS, so weigh the navigation algorithm more to the optical gyro.’ You want the robot to stay within a tenth of a meter across a distance of half a mile. Long-distance, we’re looking at 100 km of driving without GPS with less than 100-m lateral error.”

In addition, SiPhOG is built for scalability and cost-effectiveness.

“VC friends tell me that automakers are putting six lidar systems on a car, and each one is $10,000 each. It’s never going to get to mass market,” Paniccia said. “We have an optical technology for land, air, and sea. And whether that land vehicle is for agriculture or construction, or in the longer term, trucking or autonomous cars, we can do it.”

“You can literally tape SiPhOG to a dashboard and plug it into the cigarette lighter,” he said. “We have self-alignment correction, and within 15 minutes, you can have GPS-denied navigation capability. We’re also shipping this system for indoor robots like in construction.”

“If I put three SiPhOGs in a cube, I can have the same performance but at one-fifth the size and weight and a quarter of the power for precision in three dimensions,” said Paniccia. “That’s exciting for drones and maritime.”

Investors to accelerate ANELLO 

Lockheed Martin, Catapult Ventures, and One Madison Group co-led ANELLO’s unspecified Series B round. New Legacy, Build Collective, Trousdale Ventures, In-Q-Tel (IQT), K2 Access Fund, Purdue Strategic Ventures, Santuri Ventures, Handshake Ventures, Irongate Capital, and Mana Ventures also participated. 

“We’re committed to fostering the art of the possible with investments in cutting edge technologies, including advancements in inertial navigation that have the potential to enhance autonomous operations in GPS-denied environments,” said Chris Moran, vice president and general manager of Lockheed Martin Ventures. “Our continued investment in ANELLO reflects our mission to accelerate technologies that can ultimately benefit national security.”

ANELLO said it plans to use its latest funding to continue developing and deploying its technology. The company has worked with the U.S. Department of Defense to optimize its algorithms against jamming or spoofing.

“Every week, there’s an article about a commercial flight or defense-related mission getting GPS jammed, like thousands of flights to and from Europe affected by suspected Russian jamming,” noted Tony Fadell, founder of Nest and a principal at investor Build Collective. “GPS has become a single point of failure because it’s too easily compromised with various jamming and spoofing techniques.”

“ANELLO’s proven and commercially available optical gyroscope is the only navigational tool that can take over, [offering] precision over long periods of time, the size of a golf ball, low-power, low-cost, that’s immune to shock and vibration,” he added. “ANELLO will save lives in the air, on the road, and over water.”