Q-CTRL Unveils Jam-Proof Positioning System That's 50x More Accurate Than GPS (interestingengineering.com) 101
schwit1 shares a report from Interesting Engineering: Australia's Q-CTRL developed a new system called "Ironstone Opal," which uses quantum sensors to navigate without GPS. It's passive (meaning it doesn't emit signals that could be detected or jammed) and highly accurate. Instead of relying on satellites, Q-CTRL's system can read the Earth's magnetic field, which varies slightly depending on location (like a magnetic fingerprint or map). The system can determine where you are by measuring these variations using magnetometers. This is made possible using the company's proprietary quantum sensors, which are incredibly sensitive and stable. The system also comes with special AI-based software, which filters out interference like vibrations or electromagnetic noise (what they call "software ruggedization"). The system is small and compact and could, in theory, be installed in drones or cars and, of course, aircraft.
Q-CTRL ran some live tests on the ground and in the air to validate the technology. As anticipated, they found that it could operate completely independently of GPS. Moreover, the company reports that its quantum GPS was 50 times more accurate than traditional GPS backup systems (like Inertial Navigation Systems or INS). The systems also delivered navigation precision on par with hitting a bullseye from 1,000 yards. Even when the equipment was mounted inside a plane, where interference is much worse, it outperformed existing systems by at least 11x. This is the first time quantum technology has been shown to outperform existing tech in a real-world commercial or military application, a milestone referred to as achieving "quantum advantage."
Q-CTRL ran some live tests on the ground and in the air to validate the technology. As anticipated, they found that it could operate completely independently of GPS. Moreover, the company reports that its quantum GPS was 50 times more accurate than traditional GPS backup systems (like Inertial Navigation Systems or INS). The systems also delivered navigation precision on par with hitting a bullseye from 1,000 yards. Even when the equipment was mounted inside a plane, where interference is much worse, it outperformed existing systems by at least 11x. This is the first time quantum technology has been shown to outperform existing tech in a real-world commercial or military application, a milestone referred to as achieving "quantum advantage."
Whow, what a load of buzzwords. (Score:5, Insightful)
Incredibly, stable and sensitive, quantum sensors, AI-based, removal of interference, blablabla.
So where can I buy this shit?
Ah, it isn't available, because it only works on the premises of the company.
I see, bring the next one.
Re: Whow, what a load of buzzwords. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Whow, what a load of buzzwords. (Score:5, Insightful)
More importantly, where does it get the high-fidelity magnetic field maps that nobody ever made? How does it deal with the movements in Earth's magnetic fields, which are huge and happen all the time?
Maybe it can work on the premises of a robotic factory, though, which would be a nice niche.
Re: Whow, what a load of buzzwords. (Score:5, Funny)
It uses mutated neutrinos. But first you have to reverse the polarity and switch to B.
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And if you measure the field strength only in a single point, you'll find an infinite number of other points on the earth that have the same field strength (unless it was the maximum or minimum, see the mean value theorem). The device must be huge to measure an area in enough points to have something that is unique enough to be found in the map.
Re: Whow, what a load of buzzwords. (Score:2)
You could do it â" but I imagine it would require real-time sensing of the Earth magnetic field in various locations and communication back to the device, since it does change all the time.
This may be real, though â" birds manage to navigate this way as far as I know.
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You could do it â" but I imagine it would require real-time sensing of the Earth magnetic field in various locations and communication back to the device, since it does change all the time.
This may be real, though â" birds manage to navigate this way as far as I know.
How quickly does the earth's magnetic field change? I imagine for the purposes of guiding aircraft or a cruise missile, the magnetic field is effectively stationary since the time window is relatively short, i.e., minutes or at most a few hours. I wonder if the effectively stationary magnetic field could be combined with GPS and known maps to create a more robust location system.
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https://birdsarentreal.com/pages/faq
Re: Whow, what a load of buzzwords. (Score:4, Interesting)
More importantly, where does it get the high-fidelity magnetic field maps that nobody ever made?
Maybe from NOAA [noaa.gov]? (at least until they get defunded)
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It seems unwise to use anything originating from the US administration for any purpose these days.
It may well be DOGE- and putin- adjusted [threadreaderapp.com] and so anywhere from useless to actually harmful.
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nobody is capable of claiming down for the next 3.5 years because a minority of the country and yourself thought less brown people was more important than a working financial and judicial system.
Re: Whow, what a load of buzzwords. (Score:4, Funny)
The official policy of the Trump admin is "magnets, how do they work?"
JD Vance was given 2 to solve this, after clacking them together he should have a report in 2026. Signs are pointing to Jesus' love as the working hypothesis..
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Came here to say something similar. TFS says "...the company's proprietary quantum sensors, which are incredibly sensitive and stable". That's nice, but the Earth's field is not stable. I do not have numbers, but I'd suspect the fluctuations (due to space weather, drift of the poles, etc.) are enough to li
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The accuracy is not 25km.
It is as accurate as your previous recording of the fields you are referring, too.
Can be as good as a meter/yard.
However it is shifting, so you have to make new recordings as often as you need!
Used for Ages (Score:2)
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The device is an off-the shelf sensor that's been around for a while.
https://www.bartington.com/pro... [bartington.com]
Re: Whow, what a load of buzzwords. (Score:5, Informative)
Here is their paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.081... [arxiv.org] It isn't to determine the absolute position of someone somewhere on earth. This is to compensate for drift in aircaft inertial navigation. Planes use 3-axis accelerometer signals to obtain an approximate position along time, which includes some drift. The proposed system measures the magnetic field and obtains its derivative along time. It matches the magnetic field and its evolution over time on an existing map.
The map does not need to be super high resolution, because they acquire a vector of points as the aircraft moves and crosses different points on the map along several minutes of flights, so a matching algorithm can be used to determine where the whole vector lies on the map using absolute values, derivatives, and the already known approximate positions and speed vectors.
The continuous acquisition refines the position over time as the plane suddenly crosses known magnetic anomalies on the map, and can even refine all past positions. This also enables to calculate the inertial drift a posteriori, which improves the future approximates for the coming minutes of flight, further improving the initial estimates for the next correction based on the magnetic signal.
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Mod parent up.
Re: Whow, what a load of buzzwords. (Score:2)
Completely agree!
AI is thrown about with disconcerting frequency to mean things like âstatistical analysisâ(TM) or âdenoisingâ(TM) which are completely ordinary and well proven concepts in data analysis.
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The first thing I thought when I read filtering by AI: "Aha! So that's where the exploit is.".
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TFA actually explains all that.
They use very sensitive magnetometers, and the filter the output with software. That's not beyond the realms of engineering possibility by any means, we regularly do filter sensors to remove known sources of interference such as electrical noise from motors and power supplies.
Animals are known to use the Earth's magnetic fields to navigate. It seems that our sensor technology and software filtering capabilities have caught up.
The buzzwords are unfortunate, but it does seem lik
Re: Whow, what a load of buzzwords. (Score:2)
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All I needed to hear was AI and I immediately sent them my entire savings. Now I'm looking around to see what I can sell. Maybe friends and family can loan me some money.
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It determines position by estimating distances from sources of hype & PHB's* using its patented Hypometer.
* Shorthand for Dilbert's buzzword-loving boss.
More accurate than INS not GPS! (Score:5, Informative)
It is not more accurate than GPS. It is more accurate than " traditional GPS backup systems (like Inertial Navigation Systems or INS)" as per f'in summary on slashdot. INS basically means take accelerometers and integrate in time twice.
So, no, I'm not going out of bed for this.
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Yep, I came to post the same thing. And the same mess was written later where it says "outperformed existing systems by 11x" when in a plane... WHICH existing systems, and in WHAT WAY did it "outperform" (accuracy, power draw, interference resistance, range)?
So we have no idea how accurate it actually is, only that [maybe] it is 50 times more accurate than BACKUP systems that are not GPS.
Reads like a bunch of marketing BS.
50x more accurate than dead reckoning... (Score:3)
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From the chart in the video, for the first 100km travelled this new system does not know the position to better than 1000 meters (about 2/3 of a mile), but then after about 120km the accuracy increases. This is likely due to having passed through enough deviances in the earth's magnetic field to have a higher confidence of the actual location.
However, that would be dependent on traveling in a relatively straight line, as opposed to say flying in a circle 50 km in radius where you are looping over the same d
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Re: More accurate than INS not GPS! (Score:2)
A sextant and a good clock are more accurate than inertial navigation under many conditions. Under the hood of that approach is being able to find zenith or nadir and measuring the star or sun against that. Out at sea you use the horizon. But you could use a plumb bob and measure against gravity if you're on land and don't have a clear horizon to sight against.
So here's the buzzword stew for you: my sextant approach uses gravitational fields and a (possibly quantum mechanical atomic) clock to get a fix on l
Quantum Advantage (Score:2)
Then I guess them GPS satellites must be using pendulums for time keeping. Hell the military must be still using valves, as semiconductors must be sci-fi.
What a load of BS.
Re: Quantum Advantage (Score:2)
Vacuum tubes use quantum effects too, hence our computers use mechanical gears and cranks, and some electromagnetic relays, like an IBM accounting machine from the 1930s.
Also, our radios use the original Marconi tech, because even the crystal detectors of the 1920s use quantum effects. You need headphones to listen. And of course, no TV.
Vacuum tubes [Re: Quantum Advantage] (Score:3)
Vacuum tubes use quantum effects too
Not really. Vacuum tubes use thermionic emission and classical electromagnetism. You can understand them completely using classical physics.
GPS satellites, on the other hand, do use quantum effects, maser-based atomic clocks [allaboutcircuits.com]. The energy level of cesium atoms (or hydrogen, or rubidium) is a quantum effect, and of course masers are quantum devices.
Not sure what they mean by calling their magnetometers "quantum". Usual magnetometers these days are flux-gate magnetometers, which are only quantum devices in as f
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Just have to say thermionic emission is a quantum effect.
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Just have to say thermionic emission is a quantum effect.
Well, everything is a quantum effect in some sense, but thermionic emission is really no different from evaporating water: you heat water, water molecules leave the surface; you heat a metal, electrons leave the surface. In both cases, it's the high-energy tail of the Boltzmann distribution, which is classical. (For thermionic emission, it's technically the high-energy tail of the Fermi-Dirac distribution, but that's close enough to the Boltzmann distribution as to make no real difference to how a tube ope
Re: Quantum Advantage (Score:2)
BTW calling atomic clocks "classical" devices (or non quantum) is not something the physics community would be in agreement.
The potential is huge (Score:2)
for inclusion of this tech into cellphones and vastly enhanced surveillance and privacy invasion.
SPS - Schrödingers Positioning System (Score:3)
This technology is great! Or it is crap! Until we get to try it out, it is both. Though I'd say the mislabelled heading plus all the buzz words imply at least a partial wave function collapse skewing the probability greatly towards the latter.
Luckily (Score:2)
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Bingo. (no mod points today)
Experts (Score:4, Interesting)
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I hate when people say what you just said.
You are of course correct. Many of the comments are from people with no background or expertise on the subject.
But, don't forget that many or most or all people reading and writing on Slashdot are smart, technically savvy, and expert on something that is an allied subject. And, some may not be top-est of top experts but still highly knowledgeable in the field.
And, even if they are not questioning the report, they would like to learn more - that's the nature of sma
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I expect that every time a new invention is reported here.
Suddenly, it turned out that we had every foremost world expert in [insert Topic Here] all along!
It says in the article what they've developed and what it does, and that they've tested it. Now we move on to having independent testing and / or selling it as a product - and it will work or fail.
But all people do here is moan.
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This is not a "new invention" by any stretch of these words.
A serious project from a few years ago showed that it is far less capable than satellite-based positioning systems.
https://www.electronicdesign.c... [electronicdesign.com]
Quantum advantage? (Score:2)
Ok, it sounded legit until the BS about quantum advantage. Like really? Wtf.
Kinda confused (Score:1)
So What Is 50x Accuracy Of Accurate? (Score:1)
My GPS is already spot on even in bumfuck egypt where i reside.
This some fluffy bullshit I do believe.
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Until the Egyptian government, or Israeli, or US, or some other entity decides to start jamming or spoofing the GPS signals.
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Until the Egyptian government, or Israeli, or US, or some other entity decides to start jamming or spoofing the GPS signals.
The Russian Government is already jamming and spoofing GPS signals wholesale from the Black Sea to the Baltic and a bunch of their friends in the Middle East and South East Asia are doing the same in their own regions, in many cases for no apparent reason other than schadenfreude. Israel is also a major source of GPS spoofing.
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It's GPS without the satellites, which if reliable will be great, until someone figures out how to manipulate Earth's magnetic field.
relies on careful mapping of magnetic field (Score:2)
How easy would it be to actively distort a localised area of the planet's magnetic field?
Doing such will likely mess with a lot of animal and insect sense of direction.
Please fix the misleading title of this article! (Score:5, Insightful)
The title is misleading: "50 times more accurate than traditional GPS backup systems" is NOT the same as 50 times more accurate than GPS.
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This. Since regular old GPS can get you in the cm ballpark, 50 times better would be in the "human hair" area.
No, regular GPS can't get you in the centimeter ballpark. One meter resolution is the best you'll get, infrequently, and requires DGPS augmentation (IMO, DGPS augmentation is common enough to count as "regular GPS", even though it is more than just GPS).
You can get centimeter precision with GPS + RTK, or with Static GPS, but neither of those are what people would consider "regular old GPS". GPS + RTK uses very precise ranging measurements to a ground station with a precisely-known location in addition t
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Sick dogs dreams (Score:2)
Jam-proof (Score:2)
I am not a geomagnetic expert... (Score:2)
... But isn't the earths em field always wobbling at a small scale?
Certainly it's stable over aggregated data but at the 1mm scale of this thing I thought it was grooving all over the place.
Timekeeping (Score:2)
This magnetic sensing technology does not provide a solution for that.
Re:Timekeeping (Score:4)
I get this idea directly from gps.gov [gps.gov]. Oh, and NASA [nasa.gov], and NIST [nist.gov]. More references: [1 [masterclock.com]], [2 [spaceforce.mil]], [3 [bloomberg.com]], [4 [wsj.com]]
True, your phone probably doesn't use GPS for timing - it continually re-synchronizes its time to the local cell network. If it didn't, then it wouldn't be able to communicate with cell towers, which use very precise timing to implement multiplexing technologies, and handoffs from one cell tower to the next would fail. Where do the cell towers get their timing from? Primarily GPS [medium.com], with failover capabilities to wired and wireless backhaul to the network operator's central office, and even well-disciplined local time standards [masterclock.com].
The computerized world - including your phone and GPS-free laptop - relies on clocks that are synchronized in order to communicate, authenticate, keep records, etc. NTP and related technologies allow that synchronized, coordinated time to be disseminated across networks - mostly in a top-down tree. But at the top-most level, GPS is essential for keeping all those "master clocks" working together. If GPS disappeared tomorrow, many things that rely on interconnected computing systems would start to break.
Try doing some research before calling others retarded.
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Sorry, I lost you when you used the term "multiplexing" ...
A phone does not need any time, neither does a "cell tower" to communicate.
We use something as simple as radio waves for that.
The computerized world - including your phone and GPS-free laptop - relies on clocks that are synchronized in order to communicate /. nor a simple IP package you might send to me: requires any clock/time.
No, they don't.
Neither sending me an email nor posting this on
Not sure, are you an an idiot, or just "wrong educated"?
The i
Re: Timekeeping (Score:1)
The groundwork for GPS was begun in 60s, formally a project in the early 70s, fist satellite in 78, partially usable experimentally around 85, and fully operational in the early 90s.
If anything, the "idea" for GPS predates the internet.
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Thanx for your input.
I like to exaggerate a bit to get the point through.
A working internet was before a working GPS system. Can we agree on that?
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I don't know--it's kind of like splitting vaguely defined hairs. Each program hit significant benchmarks around similar dates.
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How is one cell tower able to communicate with dozens, even thousands, of devices simultaneously? There aren't enough discrete frequency channels in the available spectrum to do so. (Even if there were, that's a pretty inefficient way to use them.) Different users are scheduled to make use of different frequencies at d
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How is one cell tower able to communicate with dozens, even thousands, of devices simultaneously? There aren't enough discrete frequency channels in the available spectrum to do so. (Even if there were, that's a pretty inefficient way to use them.) Different users are scheduled to make use of different frequencies at different times. This is Time Division Multiplexing, or time division multiple access (TDMA), combined with Frequency Hopping, and uses timing to avoid having signals stomp on each other. That's been around since at least the GSM (3G) days.
The TDMA/CDMA protocols used by cell networks broadcast their own timing signals for synchronization. Thankfully nobody uses TDMA anymore. Induced currents in speakers, microphones, displays...etc was extremely annoying.
Have I still lost you? All of these techniques require precise timing among all parties, which requires precise synchronization, which would not happen today without the aid of GPS
There are very few systems that rely on GNSS for synchronization. Offhand the SON scheme in AIS is one otherwise most timing signals are managed by the source and are completely unrelated to wall time.
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For all this you do not need or use GPS.
You use a timer in your hardware.
those hyperlinked references describing how GPS is necessary for time synchronization across the world.
GPS is not used for time synchronization over the world. Who told you that nonsense?
Time synchronization in Germany for example is done with a atomic master clock that sends the time signal via radio.
Only an complete idiot would use GPS for synchronizing anything ...
You want to use GPS signals to orchestrate your own frequencies ...
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Pretty much all cell towers use GPS for timesync.
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Perhaps they do.
Who knows?
And: they do not need to do. A cell tower has no use for time ...
The correct/current time at the position of a cell tower is completely irrelevant for its functionality.
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Wrong. I know, because I have seen them myself and talked with the engineers responsible for them. Since you seemed to have used a simple google query to get your information, I suggest a different query: why do cell tower require precise timesync?
https://community.spiceworks.c... [spiceworks.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
There are other methods nowadays, but most cell site are old and only updated when they absolutely have to. The end result being that GPS is still a very common method of cheaply obtaining a goo
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Yes, it is cheap and common.
But not required.
Your first link, you did not read it, right, contradicts you.
My iPhone definitely does not get its time from GPS. It gets it via NTP.
Your second link is about the more specialized version of NTP, called Precision Time Protocol, and has strictly speaking nothing to do with cell phone towers ... except that they mention timekeeping on towers.
How you keep time is up to you. You certainly do not need GPS, but you are free to use it of course.
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Since you can't search not read:
1st link quote: "Most of the cell equipment has gps time sync at the tower. They tie into the gps satelite system to sync time not another time server. Some equipment will tie into a time server, but most of those will use the gps sync time server on-site at the tower."
2nd link quote: "According to John Eidson, who led the IEEE 1588-2002 standardization effort, "IEEE 1588 is designed to fill a niche not well served by either of the two dominant protocols, NTP and GPS."
So A)
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Well, the one who has reading comprehension problems is you:
They synchronize their clocks. And that is all.
In no way is GPS required for the functionality of the transmitters and receivers of G3 or G4 communication: /FACEPALM.
So A) GPS is a dominant protocol used for timesync and B) it is common at cell sites.
Correct. But it is not required for what ever reason. Anything else could do it.
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Time synchronization, or time sync, is the process of coordinating the clocks of multiple devices or systems to maintain a common time reference. This is crucial for various applications, including engineering, cryptography, and network operations, where accuracy and synchronization are vital.
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This was your original comment: ... but they don't. ...
> Only GPS uses GPS for timekeeping.
> Seriously, how do you come to that retarded idea?
> My phones could use GPS
> My laptops have no access to GPS
> And in real life: sub-second accuracy in time keeping: is utterly unimportant.
Nice goal post moving.
Nonsense ... (Score:1)
While it is possible and actually done in submarines etc.
You never get the accuracy they claim, what actually does 50 times more accurate actually mean?
Under good conditions GPS makes you able to pinpoint your position down to 50cm or even 20cm.
So, this is now "50 times more accurate?" Does that mean by happenstance we can measure down to 1cm/0.4cm?
So, why is this bollocks? Oh, you have to measure the earth magnetic field at every cubic meter of interest first. Record that, and when you measure again: look
My Fridge Magnet... (Score:3)
My fridge magnet can defeat your so-called "unjammable" magnetic field inferometer. Pray I don't turn on the microwave oven.
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Potentially, yes. But any transient magnetic field onboard the vehicle or not accounted for in the environment is a potential problem. How does this system distinguish between the earth's magnetic field which is fairly weak from high current wiring or a motor with an armature that has it's own magnetic field and changes orientation?
"Unjammable" sounds like a challenge (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure a countermeasure would be worked out quickly.
Since you are measuring earth's magnetic field; I suspect your sensors would then inherently have to be very sensitive towards magnetic fields in order to carry out these measurements. So something like a highly powerful magnetic field, or say an EMP or continuous frequency-varying electromagnetic pulse nearby would probably jack up all your magnetic readings making them so erratic you couldn't measure the much weaker electromagnetic field o
LLM Generated Headline Sucks (Score:1)
Here's the chatgpt headlines - mostly wrong...
Q-CTRL Launches GPS-Free Quantum Navigation with Unmatched Accuracy
Quantum Tech Beats GPS: Q-CTRL’s Ironstone Opal Debuts
Q-CTRL Achieves Quantum Advantage with New Navigation System
GPS-Free Travel: Quantum Sensors Power Next-Gen Navigation
Ironstone Opal: Quantum Navigation Sys
What happens (Score:2)
When there is a solar eruption (Carrington event) that screws up the earths magnetic field? It could also knock out the GPS satellites.
Or an EMP bomb?
Misleading headline (Score:2)
The headline is misleading. It is not claimed to be " 50 times more accurate than GPS". That left out the critically important words following "traditional GPS".
It is 50 times more accurate than traditional GPS backup systems (like Inertial Navigation Systems or INS).
Magnetic mice (Score:2)
Seems there are two basic ideas...
The first is attempting to apply the equivalent of terrain matching to constantly changing magnetic fields.
Second using field as a reference medium sort of like the way optical mice work in order to improve accuracy of the inertial system. Based on "it outperformed existing systems by at least 11x" there probably isn't any sort of actual positioning going on. If there were the outperformance would eventually become infinite as error accumulated in the inertial system.
Do you mean like magnetic isobars (Score:2)
Isobars are lines on a weather map that connect points of equal atmospheric pressure. They are used in meteorology to identify high-pressure systems, low-pressure systems, and to analyze weather patterns and pressure gradients.
Aaaaand! (Score:2)
Its gone... Stolen by chinese industrial spies. Good news it will be available next week on Temu. BOGO coming soon!
Quantum Sensor? (Score:2)
OPM's (Score:2)
IronstoneOpal’s core sensor appears to be an opticallypumped atomic magnetometer (OPM). OPM run at (roughly) room temperature and needs only a tiny heater and a pair of diode lasers—no cryostat, no liquid helium, as opposed to SQUIDs (super conducting interference devices), which I used to work on. OPM's are already flying on geomagnetic survey drones and even inside soldiers’ backpacks. The main geomagnetic field from Earth’s core is smooth (2565T), but crustal rocks add local anoma