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50x better than any other GPS alternative: Quantum sensing device

In a world-first demonstration of real-world ground and airborne trials, the quantum-assured navigation device from Q-CTRL (headquartered in Sydney, Australia) enabled successful GPS-free navigation, outperforming a high-end conventional GPS alternative by up to 50 times. The device is completely passive and undetectable, and it cannot be jammed or spoofed.

The Q-CTRL magnetometer is a quantum-assured navigation system that uses quantum sensors to detect tiny, otherwise imperceptible signals arising from Earth's structure that serve as magnetic "landmarks" for navigation.

 

 

 

 

Today, almost all online-derived navigation in vehicles, from airliners to passenger cars, relies on the Global Positioning System (GPS). However, amidst growing international conflict, GPS denial is becoming a weapon of both traditional warfare and nontraditional economic sabotage. The effects of GPS outages can be highly disruptive and costly, with estimated cost of $1 billion per day for a sustained outage across many business sectors.

There are back-up GPS systems, but most face major shortcomings that have made new solutions for GPS-free navigation a strategic technology of the highest importance.

Q-CTRL has produced a new-generation, quantum-assured navigation system, named Ironstone Opal, that delivers GPS-like positioning, is completely passive and undetectable, and cannot be jammed or spoofed. It solves the most pressing navigation challenges in the defense and civilian domains, enabling new missions, streamlining transport operations, and powering autonomous systems. The recent real-world testing of this system demonstrated that it can deliver a true commercial and strategic quantum advantage in navigation, an elusive goal across the entire quantum industry.

The Q-CTRL quantum-assured navigation system uses quantum sensors to detect tiny, otherwise imperceptible signals arising from the Earth's structure that serve as magnetic "landmarks" for navigation. According to the company, only quantum sensors provide the sensitivity and stability needed to continuously "see" these landmarks from a moving vehicle.

"We achieved an accuracy in some trials comparable to a sharpshooter hitting a bullseye from 1,000 yards away," said Q-CTRL CEO and founder Michael J. Biercuk. "But because our quantum-assured navigation system allows a vehicle to position itself accurately irrespective of how far it's traveled, by analogy that sharpshooter can hit the same bullseye no matter how far away they move from the target."

"Unlike quantum supremacy [in quantum computing], the technology is truly innovative and meets a growing market need in aerospace, defense, and autonomous cars," said Jean-Francois Bobier, partner and vice president, Deep Tech, at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). Bobier noted a recent BCG estimate of quantum sensing becoming a $3 billion industry by 2030. "Q-CTRL is paving the way to unlocking this potential with a proven quantum advantage," he added.

"Quantum advantage" indicates when a quantum solution outperforms its competitive classical counterparts under realistic conditions in a commercially relevant task. The Q-CTRL quantum-assured navigation solution is based on magnetic navigation. It leverages in-house, high-stability magnetometers in a unique architecture combined with proprietary, AI-powered quantum control software to shield the delicate quantum sensors against interference encountered in the real world to detect the Earth's magnetic fingerprint -- small variations in the Earth's magnetic field due to changing composition. The measured information about the local magnetic field in the moving vehicle can be compared against a known map drawn from a public domain or commercial database to estimate the vehicle's position relative to the map. The optimized design allows the systems to be miniaturized by trading hardware for software to enable deployment on nearly any vehicle.

VIDEO: Q-CTRL Quantum Advantage: Ironstone Opal enables Quantum Navigation for GPS-Denied Environments. [Credit: Q-CTRL]

Q-CTRL's quantum magnetic navigation system is small enough to fit on small fixed-wing drones or autonomous cars, and powerful enough to enable navigation in passenger airliners. According to the company, "Nothing in the industry approaches the combination of performance, stealth, and SWaP (size, weight, and power), making this a truly unique technology." The company is working with government agencies, including the Australian Department of Defense, the UK Royal Navy, and the U.S. Department of Defense, to deliver new quantum-sensing technologies for defense platforms. In addition, Q-CTRL is working with Airbus on quantum navigation solutions for commercial aviation.

"This is our first major system release, and we're excited that there is much more to come as we introduce new quantum-assured navigation technologies tailored to other commercial and defense platforms," said Biercuk.

Core to the Q-CTRL achievement was the development and integration of what the company calls "the world's best (publicly known) 'magnetic denoising' software." The Q-CTRL team combined advanced machine learning techniques with physics expertise to produce an algorithm for interference rejection that was both highly effective and efficient. In a head-to-head comparison against a competitor's algorithm using open-source magnetic flight data, Q-CTRL says its software "achieved 3x better positioning with 15x faster learning on the same data."

More importantly, the Q-CTRL denoising software was able to learn all relevant information about the interference experienced "on the fly," meaning it did not require any pretraining, calibration, or special vehicle maneuvers as commonly required in competitive approaches. This is a major operational advantage for end users who are not obligated to perform hours of special training tests before use.

The Q-CTRL team performed tests in both ground vehicles and in flight. It achieved quantum advantage in both, delivering superior performance to a strategic-grade GPS alternative known as an inertial navigation system (INS), a gold-standard GPS back-up system that operates by measuring vehicle motion. In these trials, magnetic map information was taken from publicly available databases, requiring no special surveys in advance of the trials.

Q-CTRL conducted real-world ground and airborne trials showing its quantum-assured navigation solution enabled successful GPS-free navigation, outperforming a high-end conventional GPS alternative by up to 50x. [Credit: Source is arXiv-Cornell University/Courtesy of Q-CTRL]

 

 

 

 

During flight tests, the Q-CTRL system achieved 99.97% uptime and operated successfully under a wide range of operating conditions, temperatures, altitudes, and maneuvers. The team achieved a maximum of 50x lower positioning uncertainty over a ~500-km flight vs. an INS, with positioning uncertainty just ~0.03% of the total distance traveled via externally mounted quantum sensors. The best trials achieved ~0.01% final positioning uncertainty; this places the new MagNav solution's performance as outcompeting public-domain figures for a range of other GPS backups, including Doppler radar, Doppler velocity lidar, and visual odometry, without the need to emit external signals that give away your position to an adversary (as in radar) or subject to weather conditions in flight.

Magnetic navigation in flight was successful with multiple sensor configurations, and outperformed the INS by at least 11x, with the entire full-stack system located inside the aircraft, where magnetic interference from avionics and other equipment is over 10 times larger than typical external sensor mounting points.

Q-CTRL's quantum-assured magnetic navigation system also successfully enabled navigation in a ground-based vehicle with the system strapped into the cargo bay of a van. In these trials, the Q-CTRL technology outperformed the INS by over 6x, and it represents the first-ever successful demonstration of magnetic navigation in any ground vehicle.

Source: Q-CTRL

Published April 2025

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