I’m probably being a little over-pedantic, but I think a fail-safe refers to a feature that puts a device in a safe state when it fails. For example, a good fail-safe device for a drone could be one that navigates it toward the ground and into a somehow out of the way location (away from people or roads where it could be a hazard).

This seems more like a potential device recovery feature.

If anything, it is a fail anti-safe… moving around with degraded navigation is always worse, right? Might miss the fact that you’ve entered restricted airspace…

Assuming loss of GPS, no, not fail-safe. Weather conditions (or anything that obscures a view of terrain) can cause this type of navigation to fail.

For example: pre-load satellite images and restrict navigation to radius covered by said images. In case of GPS failure, fail-safe to using image navigation for getting back "home".

Not required; assume you are not being jammed in those cases.

You are assuming GPS can only fail by being jammed; also consider the possibility of the hardware module itself failing.

Redundant GPS modules if that is a consideration. The camera tech in the article is for use in GPS-degraded and denied areas.

what happens with changes due to some natural events (Say flooding etc) ?

clearly could be a problem...but you are really looking at feature extraction / terrain analysis and best guessing with what is available (little different to a human doing the same job). The main thing here is that storage is so cheap and light that these these systems become easily possible. Terrain, features + building heights...filter if you need on building height / terrain...work with what is left...

The sponsor is the military so the user case is probably a war.

> The problem set given to the hackathon teams from the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Security Innovation Network (NSIN) focused on counter-UAS, AI/ML, and RF/Electronic Warfare.

All sort of landscape changing events happen in a war. Buildings burn or are bombed and leveled, dams fall and terrain is flooded, etc. The military won't rely on the satellite images in Google Map. They'll load their own fresh images. If they're not fresh enough, they'll wait until they have them.

In reports about the war in Ukraine it's common to read that FPV drones don't fly because of adverse atmospheric conditions, which could be too much wind, fog or rain. Or too many electronic warfare systems from the enemy, which is one of the points of this exercise. The drone will be shielded.

Edit: snow also changes the look of the terrain.

Interestingly it wouldn’t need satellite imagery. It could be taking and stitching its own image as it flies, then use that imagery to navigate by.

It would also let you do some interesting goal based nav, like, “Fly to that meadow”