How quantum technology can help pilots navigate more safely

For the past two decades, GPS technology has become inextricably woven into society, from smartphones to airplanes, stock markets to emergency hotlines and evenpower grids.

But the system that underpins so many aspects of modern infrastructure is more vulnerable than most people realize—and conflict around the world has allowed bad actors to take advantage of it.

GPS jamming and spoofing, where signals are either blocked or mimicked to trick receivers, haveemerged as growing threatsin recent years. In 2024 alone,over 1,000 commercial flights per daywere affected by GPS spoofing, especially while flying through regions like the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

During these incidents, in-flight instruments show pilots that their aircraft is flying higher or lower than they truly are or that they are miles off their actual location. In maritime settings, spoofed GPS signals have even causedships to veer off course or run aground. These are not isolated glitches but the result of deliberate electronic warfare tactics.

The good news is that quantum technologies may offer a new solution, with prototypes of a suite of sensor-based techniques that do not rely on satellite signals already being tested.

Several corporate partners of the Chicago Quantum Exchange, includingBoeing,Infleqtion andSandboxAQ, are among those developing applications. The CQE is a hub that connects leading universities, national labs, and industry partners to advance quantum technology and is based at the University of Chicago.

“Governments and the commercial industry are in dire need of this technology,” said Ken Devine, senior product manager for quantum navigation at SandboxAQ. “The geopolitical issues happening across the world, and the ramp up in both jamming and spoofing—Russia, Ukraine, the Middle East, Israel, Iran—everyone’s getting super disruptive, and that’s not going to go away anytime soon. Everyone is saying, ‘We basically need thisyesterday.’”

In May 2023, SandboxAQcompletedthe first of many flight tests for the United States Air Force and its commercial aviation partners, including two major Air Force exercises that year.In 2024, Boeingcompletedthe world’s first recorded flight using multiple quantum navigation systems, testing the ability of these sensors to navigate across the central U.S. for four hours without GPS.

That Boeing test incorporated two different technologies: a magnetic field-based navigation system calledAQNavfrom SandboxAQ and an inertial navigation system from quantum sensing technology companyAOSense.

“The power of quantum navigation is not just that it vastly improves existing inertial navigation systems,” said Caitlin Carnahan, vice president for quantum software at Infleqtion, which is also developing quantum navigation technology. “It’s more that it represents a new tool, a new angle from which to approach the problem of navigation that can reduce reliance on GPS and overcome issues like spoofing and jamming.”

New Tools

There are many ways for someone to measure where they’ve been and where they’re going.

For millennia, human cultures have oriented themselves by fixed points such as stars or mountains. This is essentially how GPS satellites provide navigation—they may be in constant motion, but that motion is known and predictable to such a precise degree that it doesn’t matter.

Instead of using known points, navigation can be done using an accurate map of the terrain. In this case, one can keep careful track of where and when they’ve changed course since their starting point and by how much, to derive their location relative to where they began.Alternatively, navigators can orient themselves by recognizing the pattern of changes in elevation along the path they take.

These last two—inertial navigation and map matching—are the navigation techniques used by quantum navigation technology.

AOSense’s technology uses inertial navigation while SandboxAQ uses map matching, though the map that they use is of the Earth’s crustal magnetic field rather than terrain. Infleqtion is investigating both techniques.

The Boeing flight used both quantum navigation technologies—from AOSense and SandboxAQ—even though they were very different. Jay Lowell, principal senior technical fellow at Boeing, said it was vital to consider “whether and how” the different technologies could be used together.

“Maybe that means a tradeoff of performance between sensors in moments where one struggles and the other’s strong,” Lowell said. “Fundamentally it means we just need to understand whether their combined data is better than either one alone.”

Detecting tiny changes

Inertial navigation depends on accelerometers and gyroscopes—which respectively measure acceleration and rotation—to measure movement. An inertial sensor tracks how an object moves from a known starting point by recording changes in its speed and direction.

While basic accelerometers are common in smartphones and fitness trackers, quantum inertial sensors can detect changes in motion down to the femtometer—less than the width of an atom—making them extraordinarily precise. Inertial sensors have applications in space-based technology, since they do not need maps or fixed points to navigate.

Infleqtion recently completedcommercial flight trialsof inertial-based quantum navigation in the United Kingdom and plans to conduct tests in the U.S. as well. Infleqtion’s Chicago office is also developing an AI-powered tool called SAPIENT that won first place in the U.S. Army’s xTechScalable competition.

“[SAPIENT] is focusing on the software side, taking the outputs of multiple kinds of sensors and stitching them all together with AI to provide a more robust navigation signal,” said Pranav Gokhale, general manager of computing at Infleqtion. “There is a big gap between an inertial measurement unit and a full inertial navigation system, so we’re using AI to fill that gap.”

Alternatively, magnetic navigation, or MagNav, works much like terrain-following radar, comparing real-time sensor data to a known map to pinpoint location.

But instead of elevation, the aircraft senses subtle magnetic fluctuations in the Earth’s crust—variations caused by geology, mineral deposits and even human infrastructure—and compares its measurements to a corresponding map of that field.

Scientists believe that birds can use their ability to sense the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate in a similar way. Magnetic field maps of the globe are frequently done for mineral, oil and gas surveys, as small anomalies in the field can indicate resources underground. But there are areas where high-resolution maps can be hard to come by.

“Map quality in the region you’re going to is definitely a factor that gets plugged into how well magnetic navigation can perform,” Devine said.

He identified a list of other key variables, such as the type of aircraft being used, plus its altitude and speed, as additional points of consideration for MagNav technology. At the same time, he said the importance of these tools is likely to grow as electronic warfare strategies become even more entrenched.

“We’ve validated that we can do real-time navigation with this technology,” said Devine. “And that’s huge, because the need for it is only going to increase.”

—This story was originally published in full on the Chicago Quantum Exchange website.