Quantum-assured navigation overcomes GPS denial

Quantum infrastructure software company Q-CTRL has announced successful field trials of a new generation of quantum-assured navigation solutions validated to outperform comparable conventional alternatives in challenging real-world settings, thus achieving true commercial and strategic advantage.

Today, almost all navigation in vehicles, from airliners to passenger cars, relies on the Global Positioning System (GPS). But amid growing international conflict, GPS denial is becoming a weapon of both traditional warfare and non-traditional economic sabotage; an outage is estimated to cost $1 billion per day, over 1000 flights per day are now disrupted by GPS jamming incidents, and the adoption of autonomous systems is becoming challenged by the unreliability of GPS. Meanwhile, existing GPS backups face major shortcomings that have made new solutions for GPS-free navigation a strategic technology of the highest importance.

Q-CTRL has produced a series of quantum-assured navigation systems, dubbed Ironstone Opal, that deliver GPS-like positioning, are completely passive and undetectable, and cannot be jammed or spoofed. They should therefore solve the most pressing navigation challenges in the defence and civilian domains, enabling new missions, streamlining transport operations and powering autonomous systems.

Q-CTRL’s solution is based on magnetic navigation, leveraging in-house, high-stability magnetometers in a unique architecture combined with proprietary software ruggedisation 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. Only quantum sensors provide the sensitivity and stability needed to continuously ‘see’ these magnetic landmarks from a moving vehicle, Q-CTRL said.

Q-CTRL also developed and integrated so-called ‘magnetic de-noising’ software to combat the heavy vibrations and electromagnetic interference that have blocked the transition of most experimental quantum navigation solutions from the lab to the real world, combining 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, the Q-CTRL software achieved 3x better positioning with 15x faster learning on the same data.

Importantly, the Q-CTRL de-noising software was able to learn all relevant information about the interference experienced ‘on the fly’, meaning it did not require any pre-training, calibration, or special vehicle manoeuvres. 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 field trials both in ground vehicles and in flight. In both instances, their solution was found to deliver higher performance than a strategic-grade GPS alternative known as an inertial navigation system (INS) — a gold-standard GPS backup 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.

During flight tests, the Q-CTRL system achieved 99.97% uptime and operated successfully under a wide range of operating conditions, temperatures, altitudes and manoeuvres. The team achieved a maximum of 50x lower positioning uncertainty over a ~500 km flight versus an INS, with positioning uncertainty just ~0.03% of the total distance travelled via externally mounted quantum sensors. The best trials achieved ~0.01% final positioning uncertainty; this places the 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 said this is a testament to the efficacy of the company’s software ruggedisation technology — a concept which uses proprietary AI-powered quantum control software to shield the delicate quantum sensors against interference encountered in the real world and allows the systems to be miniaturised by trading hardware for software to enable deployment on nearly any vehicle.

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. As in flight tests, position was inferred relative to a magnetic map provided from public-domain databases. In these trials, the Q-CTRL technology outperformed the INS by over 6x, and is said to represent the first ever successful demonstration of magnetic navigation in any ground vehicle. The tests thus delivered the elusive goal of commercial and strategic quantum advantage, Q-CTRL said, referring to what happens when a quantum solution outperforms its competitive classical counterparts under realistic conditions.

“We achieved an accuracy in some trials comparable to a sharpshooter hitting a bullseye from 1000 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 travelled, 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, defence and autonomous cars,” added Jean-Francois Bobier, Partner & Vice President, Deep Tech, at Boston Consulting Group.

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. The company is currently working with government agencies, including the Australian Department of Defence, the UK Royal Navy, and the US Department of Defense, to deliver new quantum-sensing technologies for defence platforms. In addition, it is working with Airbus on quantum navigation solutions for commercial aviation.

“At Q-CTRL, we’re thrilled to be the global pioneer in taking quantum sensing from research to the field, being the first to enable real capabilities that have previously been little more than a dream,” Biercuk said. “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 defence platforms.”