Navigation with a suitcase sized device that doesn’t rely on hundreds of thousands of satellites? Honestly this sounds great.
Not even thousands
Not even hundreds
Try 31
You’re literally off by a factor of 3225
Hundred of thousands of satellites? Are you on mushrooms or something?
So, for anyone else who became curious after this exchange:
I tried to look up how many there actually are. It’s hard to give a single number, since there are many different ways to count them, but vaguely speaking it’s in the range of dozens to a few hundred. GPS specifically has had 83 satellites built, of which 31 are currently operational, but most of the others still exist, they’re just parked in a higher orbit for retirement. There’s also GLONASS, BeiDou, Galileo, QZSS, and IRNSS/Navic. QZSS and IRNSS don’t have as many satellites, and the rest are kinda roughly similar in number (e.g. GLONASS has had 146 built and 24 currently operational).
So yeah. Nowhere near hundreds of thousands. Even Starlink, which now comprises more than half of the total satellites of any kind in orbit, has only about 10,000.
GLONASS
Of all the acronyms they could have decided on, this was the correct choice.
Why is hyperbole such a foreign concept on this webzone?
You think there are hundreds of thousands of GPS satellites in orbit?
Let me guess you think GPS alone can track someone.
Using quantum sensors, the company achieved ten times the accuracy of conventional satellite-based navigation systems, while maintaining the one nautical mile positioning accuracy.
Don’t we use GPS accurate to within centimeters for construction?
I’ve played with GPS from several different directions. There are a lot of GPS receivers on the hobby electronics market that will offer that level of precision, but not accurately. The aviation wide area augmentation system significantly increases accuracy to the point it can be used for precision instrument approaches.
High-end dual-frequency receivers ($$$) can do this, yes. But the earth’s magnetic field is not controlled by any government or military entities. This is pretty big
Gravitational field. There’s no way you could achieve this with the magnetic field.
I see what you mean. Yeah that’s pretty cool then. And I guess it might be impossible to jam quantum GPS.
Username checks out.
Not a single gps but multiple, the same trick could be done with this theoretically
The trouble with Quantum Navigation is you might end up where you were trying to go, but at a random point in the past where you have to change history to put right something that once went wrong.
As long as you keep it below 88 miles per hour you’ll be fine.
Great, now I know my velocity but I don’t know where I am.
You might end up exactly where you want to be, and not want to be at the same time.
And you’ll never be able to return home too.
Seems like a bit of a leap, tbh.
“Quantum sensors can sense the tiniest of changes in the gravity or magnetic field and use a previously prepared map of these properties to determine their location. Since a quantum sensor does not need to receive or send a signal to an external device, it cannot be hacked or be spoofed by a fake incoming signal either. “ Very cool!
Don’t these fields fluctuate in some currently not understood way?
Yes, constantly. The prepared map becomes less accurate over time.
So you constantly need updated maps. Reminds me of celestial navigation where you always need an up-to-date almanac.
Hhhmmmm, sounds perfect for the subscription model…
But how do you get your position to update your map? Oh… GPS will work!
What? You just download a new map for the area you want to go to every year or so, no need for GPS
I’m not sure you got me. How do the map makers update the map? If the gravity variance changes so it can’t be used to determine your position then clearly you need some other way to determine your position to update the gravity map. And what might that be??
Using the same reference points on earth that GPS uses, that doesn’t mean using GPS.
*Cant be Non-magnetically hacked
Cue magnetic mines, but where are you getting the gravitic mines from?
If it works off tiny changes in gravity, a really big rock would work.
Our mission is to sneak this Ayers rock under the boat without being detected. In and out. 45 minutes tops.
I was going to say something about the scale of gravity changes needed, but your take is way better. Cheers.
And that rock? The moon.
Well, to be fair, a big rock would also work on a GPS device, if applied directly to it.
Ah time to make use of my massive tungsten cube
They just trigger degauss on 10,000 CRT monitors simultaneously.
I don’t think it’s realistically possible to do that totally undetected. Since the earth’s magnetic field is so weak and field strength goes down rapidly as distance increases, malicious actors probably couldn’t spoof patterns well enough to make the data look real, at least not without coming very close and staying near their target.
So, like terrain-matching, but gravity field. Cool!
Two issues I have with the presentation:
A magnetic field is an external signal - the Earth’s magnetic field is actually incredibly weak…
10x better performance than GNSS … positioning accuracy of 1 nautical mile. Cheap old school handheld GPS out in the woods was accurate better than 10 feet most of the time, so what in this performance is 10x better? 10x more resistant to jamming? Seems like it should be completely impervious to jamming. 1 nm accuracy is useful, but hardly better performance.
For those confused:
nm means Nautical mile here, not nano meter
GPS is vulnerable to various attacks.
It’s unclear what the capabilities are, but there IS a Russian satellite that HAS jammed GPS for almost a whole hemisphere. It’s operated several times for a couple seconds over these past few years.
Veritassium did a great presentation on how we know this.
Why do we expect this quantum map of gravity and magnetic fields to be permanent?
It is not permanent, but the changes are slow enough
Perfect for autonomous military robots.
Pretty much, yeah. 💀
Here is the paper
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.25563
And here is the easier to read press release from Q-CTRL with less errors and ad block black screens.
The team achieved 10 times better performance than GNSS systems, with a one nautical mile of positioning accuracy.
Variation up to a full nautical mile doesn’t seem very accurate?
this article is better written:
it maintained bounded position accuracy within 1 nautical mile over an 83-kilometer trajectory. This performance, achieved without access to satellite navigation, represents a more than tenfold improvement over standard navigation-grade inertial backup systems under similar conditions.
Here is the real article without the compounding editorial errors.
Inertial navigation (INSS) and GNSS (Sat nav)is two completely different concepts. Too bad the article misses this. Perhaps AI hallucinations?
No, it’s saying it works better than INSS, without resorting to GNSS.
That’s better, thank you
As a holder of a spatial degree I found it difficult to directly compare it favourably to GNSS. Even a simple binary code calculating a position with GNSS gives sub 10-20 metre accuracy, generally closer to 2 or 3.
I don’t think it’s meant to be better than GNSS in terms of accuracy, just better in terms of reliability because it works entirely standalone without a need for satellite
Yeah nah I understood that, the quote made in the initial comment implies somewhat that it does.
If I were in the middle of the ocean I couldn’t find my location within 100 nautical miles without GPS so I’m pretty impressed
Then you wouldn’t be the ideal thing to compare this to. An experienced navigator with a couple basic tools could do similarly.
Okay, so it’s as good as an experienced navigator, that seems pretty good to me!
That’s comparable to what a skilled navigator can do with a sextant and chronometer. That’s more than enough accuracy to cross the ocean and get close enough to the port that you can see it.
Maybe GNSS stands for maGNetic compaSs and Sextant?
Yeah, I agree that I didnt understand that bit. I also didn’t understand why you need a quantum sensor to follow a map of gravitational and magnetic anomalies for orientation.
You don’t. Any appropriately sensitive/accurate accelerometer or magnetometer is sufficient to do this.
The quantum part is 90% hype used to and attract funding. There are some advantages to the cold atom based sensors Q-CTRL makes, along with issues that need to be worked on, but they are other sensing technologies that could beat it in the long run.
You don’t. Any appropriately sensitive/accurate accelerometer or magnetometer is sufficient to do this.
There are limits to sensitivity and accuracy that can only be overcome by quantum sensing though. So yes, you’re right, but that’s actually the point of the quantum part.
This is a rather common misconception about sensitivity, it is only true under the constraint where you are unable to increase the amplitude of your measurement.
You are always limited by shot noise (counting noise, quantisation noise, Poisson noise, whatever name you give it). And people love to say that you can only beat it by squeezing (increase noise in one quadrature to reduce it in another). But another option is to just increase N, turn up the laser power to have more photons or atoms in your sensor and watch your noise floor drop way faster than you will ever get using squeezing.
Now the cold atom sensors are an interesting case. No one has managed to laser cool atoms faster than an overall rate of around 10^9 atoms per second. And we have been stuck there since the mid 2000s. As a result, the fundamental noise limit from shot noise hampers these cold atom accelerometers significantly in short term sensitivity, as they just don’t have enough N of atoms in free fall. In this case, you might look to squeeze to get a better signal, but that’s a lot of complexity for not much gain.
There are only 2 examples I know of where squeezing has made a difference to a real world measurement. LIGO, can’t increase photons without thermally heating the mirrors too much, and confocal microscopes looking at biological samples, cant turn up the laser power without burning the tissue. In 99% of cases, just increase N to make a better sensor.
This is a rather common misconception about sensitivity, it is only true under the constraint where you are unable to increase the amplitude of your measurement.
Aren’t there plenty of situations where you can’t increase the amplitude of your measurement? Isn’t that why we use SQUIDS for high sensitivity magnetic measurements for example?
Quadrature squeezing is great, but I don’t think it’s the only way (or main way?) quantum sensors compete with classical sensors.
Quantum nav… awww man, for a second I thought The Orville was back!
You poked a wound I didn’t know i had.
What in the dickins?!
The Quantum Compass! Sick!
The gravitational pull is stronger on the left side so you have to account for that or else you’ll just sail around in circles. /s
Easy to correct - just keep the Skipper in the center of the boat. Gilligan’s pull is negligible.
Most sailors spend their whole lives sailing around in circles
Quantum freaks me out.
How can we possibly make a point we are not in a simulation.No reason to believe we are in a simulation and nothing about quantum suggests we are.
Just what a system administrator would say.
Well, can you make any predictions about the future state of the simulation from present and the rules you think you’ve got right? Just because it is something “computed” from a previous state doesn’t mean that you can compute it yourself…and…if you can’t make predictions…it is just conjecture (limited by our imagination of the state of the art, which now is a simulation, but it used to be god’s creation, then clockwork, then a machine, now a computer/simulation. I can’t imagine what the conjecture will become in the future…hopefully not some shitty spatial diffusion+LLM model where hallucinations are wavefunction collapse to unlikely values, lol.
We’re gonna need a bigger drone.
Eh, boat or submarine drones can be as big as you want, and the device will only get smaller (and better).
Wow, more AI. For some reason. This doesn’t sound like it needs AI but the investors would pay less, of course!
Chances are AI is easier than hand-rolling an algorithm for this. And that AI is almost certainly not an LLM.
Everyone seems to think all AI is the same thing which is NOT true.
