VIAVI subsidiary Inertial Labs has launched the INS-NV, a programmable development platform that combines an inertial navigation system (INS), an attitude and heading reference system (AHRS), and an NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX module. The goal is to shorten development cycles for Alternative Position, Navigation, and Timing (Alt-PNT) and guidance systems that need to run machine vision and navigation workloads on a single, modular hardware stack.

INS-NV integrates a set of calibrated tactical-grade MEMS sensors and a full-constellation GNSS receiver. The sensor set includes MEMS accelerometers and gyroscopes, a barometric altimeter, and magnetometers. On the GNSS side, the receiver supports GPS, QZSS, GLONASS, Galileo, BeiDou, and NavIC.

Inertial Labs is pitching the platform for real-time navigation and sensor fusion designs intended to keep operating in GNSS-denied or GNSS-compromised environments. The system also ties into the company’s existing software stack, including aiding data, sensor fusion filters, calibration software, and navigation algorithms, with the intent of delivering time, position, velocity, and attitude outputs that developers can fuse with their own perception and control software.

For engineers building visual-inertial navigation pipelines, the inclusion of an edge AI module is the practical story: it’s meant to reduce the “two-box” prototype phase where developers validate sensors on one compute platform and later re-integrate onto an embedded target. Whether that translates into meaningful schedule savings will depend on how cleanly real-world camera I/O, synchronization, and determinism behave in the final integration, but a pre-integrated INS/AHRS plus Jetson-class compute can remove a lot of early plumbing work.

“Because these systems have traditionally lacked a high-end processor, developers have to spend considerable R&D time and budget to integrate their software with the INS,” said Jamie Marraccini, vice president of Inertial Labs Products at VIAVI. He added that the platform is intended to let developers “run their own visual navigation stacks alongside our INS and AHRS technologies.”

Inertial Labs said INS-NV is available immediately. MAVLink, ASPN-, pntOS-, and MOSA-compliant variants are available on request, and the platform is designed to be expandable for additional Inertial Labs sensor modules as well as commercial off-the-shelf vision cameras.

Source: VIAVI Solutions