AI UAV Optical Navigation Module

Abto Software’s optical navigation module is a companion computer meant to keep unmanned aircraft flying and hitting targets after the satellite signal drops out — the standard problem on the front line in Ukraine, where Russian electronic warfare has made GPS unreliable across wide belts of territory. The Lviv software house introduced the system in 2023, positioning it as a bolt-on for the mid-sized fixed-wing and multirotor UAVs that make up much of the Ukrainian reconnaissance and long-range strike fleet. Abto describes the module as suitable for airframes in the seven-inch class and larger, with a stated operating range of up to 60 kilometres and an environmental envelope from −20 °C to +50 °C.

The technical heart is an Nvidia Jetson single-board computer running visual odometry and terrain-matching models. A downward-looking camera streams frames into on-board machine-learning inference, which compares them against reference imagery to estimate position without any external radio-frequency signal. Abto attributes the navigation stack to its in-house computer-vision division, which also supplies terminal-guidance modules for FPV strike drones. The company has not published the specific model architecture, the reference-imagery pipeline, or the flight-controller integration; Ukrainian operators have written in general terms about visual-navigation systems of this class relying on pre-loaded satellite tiles plus a ground-station-seeded starting fix, but the module-specific integration is not documented in open sources.

Only the Armed Forces of Ukraine are named as an operator. Abto describes the module as combat-tested; independent corroboration of unit counts, mission types, or hit rates has not surfaced in open reporting, and no contract value has been disclosed. In practice the system sits inside a broader Ukrainian effort to give domestically produced UAVs a survivable alternative to GPS, driven by the operational reality that Russian jamming and spoofing can deny satellite navigation across substantial portions of the front.

The module has not been publicly re-versioned since introduction, and Abto has not disclosed a variant roadmap. Its distinguishing pitch, relative to other Ukrainian GNSS-alternative modules, is the emphasis on the software layer — Abto is primarily a services firm — with the compute running on a commercially available Jetson board rather than bespoke hardware. That positioning fits the company’s wider defence work: the optical navigation module and the FPV terminal-guidance module share the same underlying computer-vision stack, adapted for two different points in the kill chain.