DroneOps

DroneOps is a Ukrainian-founded startup, headquartered in London with research, flight-test and production teams in Ukraine and Poland, that builds NORA — an onboard optical-inertial navigation module for drones operating where satellite navigation is jammed, spoofed or unavailable. NORA (Navigation Optical Resilient Architecture) uses a downward-facing camera and an inertial measurement unit to estimate a drone’s position in real time, then feeds GNSS-compatible coordinates to ArduPilot flight controllers over the MAVLink 2 protocol, letting it act as a GPS replacement or backup so an aircraft can hold a route, fly an automated mission or return home without a satellite fix. The module is a small unit — roughly 65 by 50 by 30 millimetres — runs on 8 to 45 volts at about 15 watts, requires ArduPilot 4.5.5 or later, and is specified to work between about 50 and 500 metres above ground, with the company noting it degrades over large featureless surfaces such as open water or uniform snow and in heavy rain, fog or snowfall.

The company demonstrated NORA at Ukraine’s defence-innovation cluster, Brave1 , on 12 May 2026, reporting roughly 0.75 percent drift error over a 90 km fixed-wing mission and 1.8 percent over a 25 km multirotor mission. It lists collaborations with the swarm-autonomy firm Swarmer and the logistics-drone company Airlogix , alongside unnamed fixed-wing and multirotor manufacturers.

NORA targets the same GNSS-denied problem as other Ukrainian autonomy firms such as NORDA Dynamics , but as a position-estimation module rather than a terminal-guidance one — its job is to keep a drone knowing where it is, not to steer it onto a target. DroneOps keeps a low public profile: it has not disclosed a founder, founding year, funding or headcount, and the performance figures above come from the company’s own demonstration rather than independent testing.