iMAR Navigation

iMAR Navigation is a German inertial systems house in St. Ingbert, in the Saarland about 150 kilometres southwest of Frankfurt. It has been building inertial measuring, navigation, stabilization and control systems for more than thirty years, with a team of over a hundred engineers, scientists and technicians and Dr. Edgar von Hinuber as managing director. Unlike the volume MEMS suppliers, iMAR spans the whole accuracy range, from MEMS units at a few degrees per hour to fiber-optic and ring-laser systems at 0.01 degrees per hour and better, and it does a large amount of application-specific engineering rather than selling only catalogue parts.

The company organizes itself by sector rather than by product. Land covers automotive testing, military vehicles, heavy trucks, construction machinery and mining. Sea and subsea covers naval vessels, ferries, work ships, yachts and submarines. Airborne covers survey aircraft, helicopters, unmanned aircraft, trainers and general aviation. Then come surveying, including gravimetry and geophysics, railway work covering geo-location, track survey and integrity monitoring, and industrial applications such as horizontal directional drilling and pipeline inspection.

The iNAT series is the backbone. iNAT-M200 and the flat-pack iNAT-M200-FLAT are the light MEMS-based navigation, surveying and control systems in the 0.1 to 10 degrees per hour class, with integrated multi-constellation GNSS and Kalman filter data fusion at 500 to 1000 Hz. iNAT-M300 sits alongside them, and iNAT-U200 is the ultra-lightweight option. Higher up, iNAT-FSLG and iNAT-FSSG use fiber-optic gyros with servo accelerometers, the FSLG reaching 0.01 degrees per hour bias stability, and iNAT-RQT and iNAT-RQH use ring-laser and quartz technologies. The older iNAV-FMS and iNAV-FSLG systems remain in the catalogue.

Defense work is a substantial and clearly separate part of the business. iPRENA is the precise navigation and weapon alignment system, iCOMBANA handles combat vehicle navigation with gyro compassing, and iSULONA covers support and logistics vehicles. MDAS and GRAM are mortar alignment systems. iPEGASUS performs transfer alignment for fire control. iTNAV is a torpedo navigation system, iATTHEMO and iATTHEMO-TRIDENT are naval heading and attitude sensors and gyro compasses, and iTAHS is the tactical attitude and heading sensor. The iIPSC family covers gyro-stabilized platforms: MSG gimbals in several payload classes, PT and PT-X pan and tilt positioners, ANTRAD dynamic antenna stabilization, TR target tracker range control and SLP stabilized launching platforms for missiles. iSSMC handles ship stabilization and iSCU is the gyro stabilization control unit.

Outside defense, iTraceRT systems including the MVT, F200 and F400 are widely used as the ground-truth reference for automotive testing. iCORUS-2 is an airborne gravimetry system, iPST does pipeline surveying, iANARO steers drill heads for horizontal directional drilling, and iTheseus handles indoor pedestrian navigation. Underneath everything sit component-level products: the iIMU inertial measurement units, iVRU vertical reference units, iMAG-DMC magnetometers, GNSS antennas, the iRBG-1 radio beacon with integrated GNSS, and rate tables for test and calibration. The company is privately held and manufactures in Germany.