Global, February 2026 – Advanced Navigation, a global leader in autonomous systems, has announced the launch of Chimera Land. A new class of navigation, this 3D Laser Velocity Sensor (LVS) is specifically designed to solve the primary challenge for underground mining: maintaining precise vehicle positioning in deep, dark, and unmapped environments where GPS cannot reach.
In underground mining, knowing exactly where a vehicle is located is mission-critical. Traditional navigation relies on GPS signals, which disappear the moment a vehicle enters a portal or adit. To compensate, mines often install expensive fixed infrastructure, such as Wi-Fi beacons or radio tags, which can be time-consuming and costly as they must be regularly maintained to keep up with the rapidly advancing mine face. This makes extending mines difficult and dangerous.
Joe Vandecar, Head of Product at Advanced Navigation, says, “In a production environment, navigation is critical. When positioning fails, haulage stalls, drill rig alignment drifts, and ore reconciliation becomes inaccurate. These disruptions create a cascade of operational lag that directly erodes profitability.”
Chimera Land: 3D Lasers to Navigate Beyond Fixed Infrastructure
When fused with an Advanced Navigation inertial navigation system (INS), Chimera Land allows underground vehicles to maintain stable navigation over extended distances and time. Instead of needing to “ask” an external beacon or satellite for its location, the sensor uses specialized lasers to measure a vehicle’s ground-relative 3D velocity with high accuracy. By feeding this precise data into the vehicle’s INS, the sensor eliminates the inherent “drift” that typically comes with standalone INS.
This integration is made possible with AdNav Intelligence, the company’s sophisticated proprietary software. Drawing on adaptive algorithms, the fusion engine dynamically weights the input from each sensor, adjusting reliance in real time based on their reliability scores, environmental conditions, and operational context.
The result is a resilient, high-performance, infrastructure-light positioning solution that excels in the high-dust, zero-light conditions typical of underground mines.
“Development areas in mining have long been held back by fragile external infrastructure and complex setups that struggle to keep pace with a moving mine face,” says Vandecar.
“Chimera Land changes that. By providing a fully onboard, self-contained solution, we’ve eliminated the ‘positioning gap’. Even in the deepest, unmapped headings, we turn navigational guesswork into absolute operational certainty, ensuring that autonomous fleets keep moving without interruption.”
Proven in the Depths of Europe’s Deepest Mine
To prove its resilience, Chimera Land was demonstrated in Europe’s deepest underground mine – a 1.4km deep labyrinth – as part of BHP’s Deep Mining Call.
When integrated with Advanced Navigation’s high-performance Boreas D90 INS, the solution achieved a position accuracy of 99.9% of distance traveled. Crucially, this performance was maintained without relying on any fixed positioning infrastructure, pre-existing maps, or external aiding.
Key performance benchmarks include:
“Maintaining this level of precision demonstrates a level of performance that few systems in the world can rival without any prior intelligence of the environment. These results prove we’re one step closer to unlocking scalable underground autonomy,” says Vandecar.
Enhancing Deep Mines: From Infrastructure-Lite to Fully Autonomous
As mines move deeper and into more hostile geological frontiers, the cost of installing fixed infrastructure becomes prohibitive. Chimera Land is engineered to maintain high-confidence estimation in total darkness, heavy dust, and high-vibration mining environments. It allows for “infrastructure-lite” operations across the value chain:
“To keep human operators safe from hazardous conditions, assets must possess the ‘situational intelligence’ to make real-time decisions,” Vandecar adds. “Chimera Land provides the foundational certainty required for this evolution, ensuring absolute positioning integrity in the world’s most challenging environments.”
Availability
Chimera Land is available to purchase today.
About Advanced Navigation
Advanced Navigation is a global leader in navigation and autonomous systems. By leveraging capabilities in software-enhanced hardware, every solution delivers unrivaled capabilities and exceptional performance across land, air, sea and space applications where GNSS is unreliable.
Made possible with extensive research, testing and vertically integrated manufacturing, the company has progressed into deep technology fields, including robotics, inertial, photonic and quantum sensing, artificial intelligence, underwater acoustics, and GPS antennas and receivers. Customers choose Advanced Navigation for rapid product delivery and unmatched technical field expertise.
Headquartered in Sydney, Australia, with research and production facilities nationwide and offices globally. Advanced Navigation is an Australian manufacturer exporting worldwide. #JoinTheAutonomyRevolution
