Advanced Navigation America, the US arm of global robotics company Advanced Navigation, is expanding manufacturing in Huntsville, Alabama, to scale high-precision navigation technology designed to keep mining equipment positioned and operating when GPS cannot be relied on.
In mining, every decision impacts safety, efficiency, and continuous production. Yet across the industry, 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 US$110 million Series C round, this new Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) Centre of Excellence will research, develop, and manufacture deep technologies across fiber optics, MEMS, laser sensing, photonics, vision-based systems, AI, and quantum sensing. These technologies will help autonomous systems in mining and heavy industries maintain precise vehicle positioning in deep, dark, and unmapped environments where GPS cannot reach. 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.”
Technology that is extraordinarily difficult to make
The hardest technology is often the most important technology to own. Building fiber 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, FOG sensors excel in underground environments where GPS signals cannot 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: Turning hard science into American capability
Huntsville was built around hard technology. Surrounded by Redstone Arsenal, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Centre 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 US. 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.”
Built in America for miners
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 defense 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. The Huntsville facility establishes a major US manufacturing node alongside Advanced Navigation’s Australian and United Kingdom operational arms, enabling a trilateral production footprint across all three nations.
This strengthens supply chain redundancy, increases global production capacity and allows Advanced Navigation America to respond faster to local US mining requirements.
“The challenge isn’t simply inventing better technology,” said Cohen.
“It’s being able to manufacture it reliably, at scale, and get it into the hands of our customers to keep operations running. That is what we’re building in Huntsville.”
“Our investment in our PNT Centre of Excellence gives our US customers direct access to the technology, engineering expertise and support they need for their most critical mining projects, backed by additional capability across Australia and the United Kingdom.”
By turning deep technological breakthroughs into mass-producible, field-ready systems, Advanced Navigation America is equipping customers to operate with total confidence in the world’s most extreme environments.