The Secret To Better Airplane Navigation Could Be Inside the Earth's Crust 32
Airbus's Silicon Valley innovation center Acubed and Google spinout SandboxAQ have successfully tested a quantum-sensing navigation device as an alternative to GPS during 150 hours of flights across the continental United States. The toaster-sized MagNav device uses quantum physics to measure unique magnetic signatures in Earth's crust [non-paywalled, syndicated link], with an AI algorithm matching those signatures to exact locations.
The technology achieved Federal Aviation Administration requirements by pinpointing aircraft location within two nautical miles 100% of the time and within 550 meters 64% of the time. SandboxAQ CEO Jack Hidary called it "the first novel absolute navigation system to our knowledge in the last 50 years." The analog system cannot be jammed or spoofed like GPS, which faces increasing tampering in the Middle East and around Ukraine and Russia.
The technology achieved Federal Aviation Administration requirements by pinpointing aircraft location within two nautical miles 100% of the time and within 550 meters 64% of the time. SandboxAQ CEO Jack Hidary called it "the first novel absolute navigation system to our knowledge in the last 50 years." The analog system cannot be jammed or spoofed like GPS, which faces increasing tampering in the Middle East and around Ukraine and Russia.
Unique Magnentic Signatures? (Score:2)
I wonder how it will fare flying over the Large Hadron Collider when they switch it on...
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I imagine flying over particularly active areas of the earth's crust (volcanos, subduction zones) will also affect accuracy. Still, absolute navigation at that accuracy without artificial references is really good.
haha (Score:1)
"non-paywalled, syndicated link"
*visits page*
"Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker"
Isn't this what migrating birds & animals use? (Score:2)
Quick search and the first decent article that came up: https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/science-blog/how-birds-sense-magnetic-field-earth-help-them-navigate
So, like silicon chips and transistors are high energy replacements for low energy neurons, we have created a complex high energy requiring alternative.
Humans could do with some kind of ethical & non "end of the world causing" way we can create completely new organic machines that can do some of these things. It's like Babbage trying to create a thinking
Re: Isn't this what migrating birds & animals (Score:3)
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Most birds are real
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Birds are very complex.
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Better? (Score:4, Informative)
How the fuck is 550 meter accuracy, let alone 2 nautical miles accuracy, better than GPS.
In aircraft they use Wide Area Augmentation System(WAAS) and Local Area Augmentation System(LASS) GPS. WAAS has 1 meter accuracy.
Then there is Differential GPS(DGPS) use in surveying with 1cm accuracy. So LAAS could be enhanced to provide that level of accuracy.
I can see no point in this new system and we haven't even touched on the fact that the "magnetic signatures" are moving. Sometimes in unpredictable ways.
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Seems like it would work as a backup/secondary system though, don't you think?
It's not good to have single points of failure.
Options (Score:2)
Re:Better? (Score:5, Insightful)
A punk with a briefcase can jam GPS. A malicious state actor can deny GPS to a large area -- or worse, spoof it. This is routinely happening.
Also, it's a prototype vs a system with decades of refinement.
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The point I guess is that it still works if the GPS satellite infrastructure goes down, but yeah, that accuracy sucks. I imagine you could get close to that with simple dead-reckoning which also doesn't require any infrastructure.
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That's part of the reason why the accuracy isn't less than 2.5 meters. Apparently it can use the magnetic field on a macro scale to determine location but localized intermittent field distortion isn't a factor because the system isn't trying to be precise. GPS is a fairly recent technology. It wasn't widely used for civilian applications until 2000 when Selective Availability was discontinued. Before then, the accuracy was 100 meters. Before GPS made its way into civilian aircraft, you had to use direc
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I'd guess they will improve it further but it actually already qualifies for aviation use ... "The Federal Aviation Administration requires that while planes are en route they must be able to pinpoint their exact location within 2 nautical miles."
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I suspect it is accurate enough to find the airport if/when GPS fails or is jammed. Landing the plane will be up to the pilot.
history (Score:3)
History began when these guys finished college. In prehistoric times, before GPS, like before about 1990, airplanes rarely were able to determine where they were or make it to their airport of destination.
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Nobody wants to go back to using a sextant stuck through of a hole in the cockpit. It wasn't very accurate. The more accurate methods used over land require artificial external references (LORAN and later VOR)
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A sextant works pretty well. A decent navigator can get a fix to within a nautical mile or so. They don't work very well during the day though.
The OG unaided navigation was big arrows drawn on the ground [smithsonianmag.com] and planes did get lost all the time. The next step was building radio navigation aids wherever you could, but if you weren't near those, over the ocean for example, planes still got lost all the time.
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A sextant works pretty well. A decent navigator can get a fix to within a nautical mile or so.
Only if you have a reliable clock as well. You can't measure longitude with just a sextant.
(and I'm dubious about getting longitude to within a nautical mile. That requires exquisite timing.)
TF are these toasters *doing*? (Score:2)
Every time they talk about this damn thing it's a different size and works by a different mechanism. Explanations given vary from this magnetic field mumbo jumbo to essentially just being a near perfect dead reckoning integrator.
Anyone have links to any actual papers or journalism on the subject that hasnt been oversimplified to the point where it is just nonsense?
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This seems to really be a magnetic field sensor, not the dead-reckoning device. If you sample enough of the earth's magnetic field (direction and magnitude) continually while in flight, you can search through the magnetic field map of the earth with your array of sensor readings and find out where on the map you are.
But here's a gem from the article:
The quantum sensing device is completely analog , making it essentially unjammable and unspoofable, SandboxAQ’s Hidary said. Unlike GPS, it doesn’t rely on any digital signals that are vulnerable to hacking.
This doesn't sound right, it's not even wrong. "Analog" anything doesn't mean immunity to attack.
The information it provides is generated entirely from the device on board, and leverages magnetic signatures from the Earth, which cannot be faked, he said.
This confident statement will probably be proven wrong a few ye
You had me up to AI (Score:2)
MagNav uses quantum physics to measure the unique magnetic signatures at various points in the Earth’s crust. An AI algorithm matches those signatures to an exact location. During the test, Acubed found it could be a promising alternative to GPS in its ability to determine the plane’s location throughout the flights.
If you need AI to solve your problem then you don't actually know the answer. While the sensing technology seems theoretically sound, it's implementation is unreliable which is precisely the problem that is sought to be solved.
But Earth's magnetic field changes? (Score:2)
Earth's magnetic field isn't constant. It mutates constantly in response to what's going on inside the crust and core and in the atmosphere. Sometimes as often as every second.
Re: But Earth's magnetic field changes? (Score:2)
Pardon me while I schedule a power transfer over our DC intertie.
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I want to see comparison to non-AI algorithms (Score:1)
with an AI algorithm matching those signatures to exact locations
How does it compare against non-AI algorithms matching those signatures to exact locations?
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Slightly better. But it's a tradeoff between big stock price moves and a small loss in accuracy.
wong guess (Score:2)
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