In the context - a hackathon sponsored by the US Department of Defense - it has great utility. GPS (and any radio-based location system) is quite vulnerable to denial by enemy jamming. This technique would by extremely relevant in a war between peers, and probably provides a much lower cost option than high-precision inertial navigation systems.

Tangentially, this isn't really new - ground-pointed RADAR system combined with a good terrain dataset can also be used.

A small team managed to implement relocalisation (the technical name for this) in 24 hours is reasonably interesting.

If you want to try yourself you can use colmap (https://colmap.github.io/faq.html#register-localize-new-imag...) to do the same thing. I suspect that colmap not only does lat:lon but gives you a heading as well. (well I know it does, thats how it )

Now, had they made it happen _on the drone_ that would be more interesting. It looks like it was a simulated flight, especially as there is no rolling shutter wobble. Moreover, if you want real time, you need a monster GPU, unless they've done something clever.

Low cost weapons systems