Ananth navigation centre sharpens Trivandrum’s edge

Trivandrum seems to be rediscovering its mojo. The Navy Day 2025 display, hosted for the first time in Kerala, was the highlight – coming just after news that BrahMos Aerospace would get 257 acres of land. This followed the establishment of the country’s first Centre for Space Medicine and Research at the Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute, while TEDxThiruvananthapuram says it is set to return on December 20 after a gap of seven years.

Furthermore, boosting Kerala's claim as a rising high-tech research and development centre, Hyderabad-headquartered Ananth Technologies has established the Ananth Centre of Excellence for Navigation (ACEN) in Trivandrum. The company, founded in 1992, has been part of every single Indian space programme since its inception and has contributed to 98 satellites and 107 launch vehicles.

For Ananth Technologies, the move to set up a navigation-focused R&D hub in Kerala is both deeply personal and sharply strategic. Its Chairman and Managing Director, Subba Rao Pavuluri, has long-standing ties with the state from his student days at the Regional Engineering College (now NIT Calicut). So, when it came to building a centre dedicated to navigation systems, he says the choice was obvious.

“Kerala was a natural choice, given the state’s deep roots in navigation knowledge from the Cheran times. In a place of such heritage, when you have the presence of premier space institutions and a group of top space science talent, Trivandrum became the top pick,” he told the media on the eve of ACEN’s inauguration.

But heritage is only half the story. Rao frames ACEN as a mission-aligned project for a country pushing hard towards technological self-reliance. “Indian brains also can create top-quality technology in this country. We strongly believe that space technology is one area where India can excel globally. The collaboration between government initiatives and private enterprises in this area is another step towards the government’s declared goal of Atmanirbhar Bharat or self-reliant India.”

With demand for satellites set to quadruple, launches expected to accelerate, and navigation emerging as a high-stakes technological frontier, centres like ACEN will not just support India’s ambitions – they will shape them. The state-of-the-art lab at the Kinfra Apparel Park complex clearly impressed Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) Chairman and Department of Space Secretary V. Narayanan, who used the occasion to reflect on how far India has come in just a few decades.

Past and Future: “I remember 1993, when we were in Russia, we needed permission even to see some of the equipment, like their gyroscope. But today, I am seeing such equipment getting developed not in a government set-up but in a private organisation. That tells you India has come a long way.”

Narayanan, however, did not gloss over the scale of the challenge ahead. “India has 57 satellites operating now, but we need four times that. So, there is going to be steep demand for satellite and component manufacturers,” he said. In such a scenario, facilities like Ananth Technologies – where both high-end product development and research are undertaken – will be essential for realising the goal of becoming a developed nation, Viksit Bharat, by 2047.

He also admitted that when India first opened the space sector to private companies, many within the system were apprehensive. “But looking back, we have to thank Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the vision,” he said. The Prime Minister has also asked the space establishment to target 50 launches annually by 2030. “Isro alone cannot pull this off, and the private sector will have to play a big role.”

Luxury to Necessity: The demand for advanced navigation technologies is no longer theoretical. It is fast becoming a necessity – not just for defence but also for civilian applications such as autonomous mobility, precise logistics, and space-based communication. As the recent Operation Sindoor has shown, electronic warfare is now a defining element of modern defence, and the ability to execute precision strikes in GPS-denied environments is critical.

This is where ACEN’s focus becomes strategically significant. The idea for the centre started seven years ago, and proof that their work and research had begun in earnest came in the form of two books ACEN released at the inauguration event.

Unlike many such white papers that sink without a trace at tech conclaves, these well-produced books given to attendees traced developments in the navigational sector over the last five decades, while the other highlighted the navigational skills of different species in the animal kingdom.

Foreign Bugbear: One major area of focus for ACEN will be the maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) needs of the Indian defence forces. Over the past 50 years, India has acquired “five generations of technology, from mechanical gyros to new-age systems,” explained Paul Pandian, Director of Navigation at Ananth Technologies. All of these systems need periodic servicing – not because they fail, but because the embedded foreign software requires it.

“These parts procured from overseas come with software embedded with such instructions – like if it is more than this many number of switch-ons, or if it is more than 1,500 or 2,000 hours of operation, it needs to be serviced,” he said. This mandates the defence forces to ship equipment abroad repeatedly – a costly, time-consuming and strategically inconvenient cycle.

The idea, Pandian said, is to build fully home-grown systems that can act as “drop-in replacements” and also build the capability to modernise older systems already in service. “This is a huge requirement that India has to undertake,” he added, pointing to the scale: in the last Union Budget, 1.8 lakh crore rupees was earmarked for defence modernisation, of which 1.12 lakh crore was identified specifically for indigenous development and procurement.

Next Decade: Modern navigation systems must operate in environments where traditional GNSS signals may be denied or spoofed. ACEN’s research roadmap reflects this reality.

“Modern-day requirements call for developing multimodal navigation with sensors, signals and software all put together, and the use of artificial intelligence to fine-tune it,” Pandian said. This includes research into quantum technologies which, he noted, could become part of the “ultimate navigation tool” within the next ten years.

Crucially, the centre plans to build collaborations with universities and startups, ensuring the research pipeline remains dynamic. Many of these developments, he said, will naturally spill into the civilian sector, enabling innovations that can shape transportation, logistics and broader economic activity.

“Such developments will bring their own synergy into the civil areas also… and it will further expand economic development in the country.”

A City Rising: Trivandrum’s scientific identity has always been anchored by Isro, VSSC and decades of aerospace activities. What is emerging now is a more layered ecosystem – one where private R&D, defence needs, space medicine, global aerospace supply chains and a local talent pool converge.

And if the momentum continues, Trivandrum’s rediscovered mojo may well become a defining feature of India’s next decade in space and defence technology.

Three years on, AI race still continues

We just marked the third anniversary of ChatGPT, and what a ride it has been. Google, which declared Code Red soon after OpenAI launched the chatbot, is now edging ahead with Gemini 3. So it is now Sam Altman’s turn to call all hands on deck as OpenAI gets ready to release its new model, apparently to be called Garlic. As the Silicon Valley giants race against each other, China’s DeepSeek has released its new thinking model, V3.4 Speciale, which users there say is better than ChatGPT 5 and has achieved gold-medal performance on the International Mathematical Olympiad test.

As part of expanding its global footprint, OpenAI is increasing its presence in India. The latest report says it is in talks with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to build AI compute infrastructure in India and co-develop agentic AI solutions for enterprises. Google, meanwhile, has joined hands with Accel to find and fund India’s earliest-stage AI startups in a first-of-its-kind collaboration for the Google AI Futures Fund, launched earlier this year. Google and Accel will jointly invest up to 2 million US dollars in each startup through Accel’s Atoms programme, with both firms contributing up to 1 million US dollars.

Chinese firm aims for Nvidia market

One area where China is looking to forge ahead is semiconductors. Their latest star is Moore Threads, a five-year-old graphics processing unit (GPU) developer created by Nvidia’s former China chief, Zhang Jianzhong. The company is aiming to catch up with Nvidia in artificial intelligence chip development and become a global player. The company has just been listed in Shanghai and its shares soared 468 per cent on debut, giving Moore Threads a market capitalisation of about 40 billion US dollars. But that is less than 1 per cent of Nvidia’s 4.5 trillion US dollars.

Bharatanatyam mudras to train robots

Bharatanatyam hand gestures, or mudras, could be more useful in training robots, say researchers at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. The main author of this study, published in the Scientific Reports journal, is Professor Ramana Vinjamuri, who has spent more than a decade trying to decode how the brain manages detailed hand control. She tells Robotics Observer that dancers maintain exceptional agility well into older age due to continuous, rigorous training. “This observation sparked our curiosity: could the gestures in dance represent a ‘superhuman’ movement vocabulary?” Her team is now looking to use this knowledge to enable robotic arms to perform gestures with human-like dexterity.

Sky-high match was a top draw

The lengths to which engineers will go for a wild idea is truly impressive – this time, to host a full-blown football match in the sky. The plan? Use a giant balloon to hoist a 16×10-metre platform weighing 1.2 tons. Add players and equipment, and you’re basically dangling more than 2.5 tons from this airborne turf, reports Interesting Engineering. The team, led by Russian extreme-sports athlete Sergey Boytsov, slogged through 700 hours of assembly, surviving every imaginable slip-up and weather tantrum. But they finally pulled it off: a complete match staged 1,800 metres above ground. And the snippets posted by Boytsov were jaw-dropping enough to pull in 54 million viewers on Instagram alone.