In mining, every decision impacts safety, efficiency, and continuous production. Yet across the industry, some underground and surface operations remain tethered to vulnerable, legacy navigation infrastructure – relying on easily disrupted GPS signals that compromise accuracy and increase downtime.
To close this technological gap, Advanced Navigation America, the US arm of global robotics company Advanced Navigation, is expanding manufacturing in Huntsville, Alabama, to build and deliver complex, high-precision mining navigation technology.
Backed by a US$110 million Series C funding round, this new Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) Centre of Excellence will research, develop, and manufacture deep technologies across fibre optics, MEMS, laser sensing, photonics, vision-based systems, AI, and quantum sensing.
These technologies the company says will help autonomous systems in mining and heavy industries maintain precise vehicle positioning in deep, dark & unmapped environments where GPS cannot reach.
It adds that it will also accelerate US mergers and acquisitions, bringing complementary technologies and expertise into the company’s portfolio. “Together, these investments will expand the technologies available to mining operators, helping equipment navigate more precisely, operate in GPS-denied environments and reduce reliance on human intervention in hazardous areas.”
“Resilient navigation and positioning is becoming the backbone of the autonomy shaping the future of mining and other heavy industries,” said Mike Cohen, President of Advanced Navigation America. “The challenge for America is making sure the industrial base can produce these vital technologies as quickly and reliably as demand is growing. That is the gap we are addressing in Huntsville: bringing high-performance manufacturing and faster delivery closer to the customers and industries that depend on it.”
The company says the hardest technology is often the most important technology to own. “Building fibre optic gyroscope (FOG) sensors precise enough to detect the Earth’s rotation requires engineering at a level similar to semiconductor fabrication, where even microscopic variations can affect performance. That makes the manufacturing technique itself part of the underlying intellectual property.”
With this extreme precision, it argues that FOG sensors excel in underground environments where GPS signals can’t reach. “They are ideal for navigating haulage trucks, loaders, and Load-Haul-Dump (LHD) vehicles, as well as guiding high-accuracy production drill rigs. By delivering reliable, high-precision positioning underground, FOG technology enables robust fleet management, ensures strict chain-of-custody tracking, and verifies that ore is dumped in the correct locations.”
Advanced Navigation is one of a few companies globally with the capability to produce strategic-grade FOGs and laser velocity sensors at scale. These technologies provide the precision required for heavy industrial systems to understand where they are and how they are moving when GPS is degraded or unavailable across harsh environments.
“With technology this precise, you can’t separate engineering from manufacturing,” said Chuck Matheny, Vice President of US Operations at Advanced Navigation America. “Production, calibration and validation all have to work together. Bringing those capabilities under one roof gives us control from the sensor through to the finished system. This means we can move beyond the limitations of legacy navigation tech and build for the applications driving industry today, and those still taking shape.”
Huntsville was built around hard technology. Surrounded by Redstone Arsenal, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the country’s second-largest research park – the city is home to one of the highest concentrations of engineers and STEM workers per capita in the United States. It has the specialist workforce and industrial base required to manufacture complex mining technologies.
“Huntsville has spent generations turning hard science into American capability,” Cohen continued. “We’re putting the people who build and deploy this technology within minutes of our customers, changing how quickly we solve challenges, such as reducing operational downtime, and deploying safer, more efficient mining vehicles.”
Advanced Navigation was founded to solve one of autonomy’s hardest problems: how machines can navigate accurately when GPS cannot be relied upon. Today, its technology is deployed across land, air, sea and space, ranging from deep underground mining and maritime operations to defence systems and lunar exploration. The company has more than 100,000 systems deployed globally, with customers spanning some of the world’s largest aerospace, defence, resources and technology organisations including BHP, Fortescue, Leonardo, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and Intuitive Machines.
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