26th Australian Institute of Physics Congress and the Australian and New Zealand Conference on Optics and Photonics

Field Validations of Quantum-Enabled Navigation on Dynamic, Real-World Platforms

Not scheduled

20m

Belinda Hutchinson Building (The University of Sydney )

Contributed Oral AIP | Atomic and Molecular Physics (ATMOP)

Description

Quantum sensors utilizing atomic vapours can enable passive, GPS-free navigation through their exquisitely sensitive and stable measurements of inertial quantities and magnetic fields. These quantum measurements make bounded position-fixing possible in environments where GPS is unavailable or untrusted —irrespective of mission duration or distance travelled— through map matching against existing gravitational and magnetic anomaly maps. However, the real-world operation of these devices is challenging due to the effects of external interference, platform noise and SWaP (size, weight and power) constraints. Q-CTRL is developing both hardware and software to make quantum sensors functional on real-world dynamic platforms. Our approach trades complex mechanical systems for software-enabled control solutions, resulting in strapdown quantum inertial and magnetic sensors with robustness to platform-induced noise, few moving mechanical parts, low-SWaP, low maintenance, and high reliability. This differentiates our technology from competitors and solves the key challenges in quantum-enabled navigation without GNSS.

Here, we report on world-first demonstrations of quantum-enabled navigation that utilize Q-CTRL’s in-house-developed quantum sensors. We will show results pertaining to two categories of quantum-enabled navigation: airborne magnetic-anomaly navigation (MagNav) and maritime gravity-anomaly navigation (GravNav). For airborne MagNav, we have undertaken >100 hours of flight trials under a wide range of flight conditions (e.g. different altitudes, banking manoeuvres, magnetic environments), where we show that Q-CTRL’s real-time, in-flight MagNav system robustly achieves average bounded positioning of 50-250m and required navigation performance (RNP) of 0.3NM. For maritime GravNav, during surface vessel trials in Sea State 4 conditions, we demonstrate 1NM bounded positioning (RMS) over an 8 hour (80NM) trajectory in the open sea.

Our demonstrations show that quantum sensing can deliver useful performance and achieve new positioning capabilities in real-world dynamic environments where operation is typically degraded, and offer a multimodal navigation approach utilising both magnetic and gravitational signals to perform bounded position fixing without GNSS.