Delivering quantum advantage to airborne systems
The challenge
Today, almost all navigation in vehicles, from airliners to passenger cars, relies on the Global Positioning System (GPS). But amidst growing international conflict, GPS denial is becoming a weapon of both traditional warfare and nontraditional economic sabotage; an outage is estimated to cost $1 billion per day, over 1,000 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.
Impact
50x
improvement over the performance of a strategic-grade inertial navigation system in real flight tests
The outcome
Ironstone Opal demonstrated in world-first field-trial demonstrations that it could deliver positioning accuracy better than conventional GPS backups, delivering true commercial and strategic quantum advantage while addressing threats to global trade.
Q-CTRL has produced a new generation of quantum-assured navigation systems, 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.
In a world-first demonstration, 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. These tests deliver true commercial and strategic quantum advantage in navigation, an elusive goal across the entire quantum industry.
Q-CTRL provided a new solution from top to bottom, built around the concept of “software ruggedized hardware.” The Q-CTRL quantum-assured navigation system uses quantum sensors to detect tiny, otherwise imperceptible signals arising from Earth’s structure that serve as magnetic “landmarks” for navigation -- only quantum sensors provide the sensitivity and stability needed to continuously “see” these landmarks from a moving vehicle.
Performance was validated using tests conducted in both ground vehicles and in flight. The Q-CTRL system 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 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 maneuvers. The team achieved a maximum of 50x lower positioning uncertainty over a ~500km 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 ten 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. 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 represents the first ever successful demonstration of magnetic navigation in any ground 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 travelled, by analogy that sharpshooter can hit the same bullseye no matter how far away they move from the target.”
Achieving these results required a concerted effort to ensure quantum technology solutions worked in real operating environments. Heavy vibrations and electromagnetic interference have blocked the transition of most experimental quantum navigation solutions from the lab to the real world, but are counteracted by unique Q-CTRL technology.
Core to the Q-CTRL achievement was the development and integration of the world’s best (publicly known) “magnetic denoising” software. The Q-CTRL team combined advanced AI 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.
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 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.
Looking ahead, 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. 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 Defence, the UK Royal Navy, and the US 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.
