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[–] 67 points 4 days ago (6 children)

Navigation with a suitcase sized device that doesn't rely on hundreds of thousands of satellites? Honestly this sounds great.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 days ago (2 children)

    Hundred of thousands of satellites? Are you on mushrooms or something?

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  • [–] 15 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 21 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    Wait until you hear about compasses and maps!

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    [–] 206 points 5 days ago (13 children)

    “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!

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  • [–] 91 points 5 days ago (4 children)

    *Cant be Non-magnetically hacked

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  • [–] 40 points 5 days ago (3 children)

    Cue magnetic mines, but where are you getting the gravitic mines from?

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  • [–] 37 points 5 days ago (4 children)

    If it works off tiny changes in gravity, a really big rock would work.

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  • [–] 47 points 5 days ago (1 child)

    Don't these fields fluctuate in some currently not understood way?

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  • [–] 48 points 5 days ago (1 child)

    Yes, constantly. The prepared map becomes less accurate over time.

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  • [–] 14 points 4 days ago (6 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 16 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    Its better performance than existing non-gps systems - not better than GPS. For ships , being within 1nm after thousands of miles of travel is really well performing. Obvious the real play here is weaponry though, since GPS isnt reliable in warfare and on-board sensors can do the detail work of target identification once in an area, the hard part is a way for them to self navigate accurately over long distances without GPS.

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    [–] 51 points 4 days ago (4 children)

    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.

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    [–] 98 points 5 days ago (15 children)

    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?

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  • [–] [S] 163 points 5 days ago (8 children)

    this article is better written:

    https://science.report/discover/quantum-gravimeter-demonstrates-gps-free-navigation-in-coral-sea-trial-86654/

    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.

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    [–] 70 points 5 days ago
    [–] 18 points 4 days ago (4 children)

    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?

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  • [–] 5 points 3 days ago

    Yes and no. They often use GPS assisted by beacons. Those beacons are often set up using both high quality GPS but also surveying tools, and you might have seen markers in the ground on cities which was placed using very well calibrated tools so it has a well known very precise precision. Those beacons are easier to track for other machinery because they are so much closer so the radio signal is much clearer and angular precision is much better

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    [–] 21 points 4 days ago (3 children)

    Perfect for autonomous military robots.

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    [–] 11 points 4 days ago (2 children)

    The only significant word here is "quantum". This stuff is too expensive to be useful for anyone other than the military right now. Gravity maps are controlled information as well. Used for ballistic submarine missiles. The maps created by the military will never be made public. (It would look like a highway of where every vessel is or will be)The accuracy of satellite measurements is 3km, with physical topographic (sea/land) resolution at 1.2km. The long-term plan is to have these sensors traverse areas, record data, and then share it with a database. Even those maps are realistically only 300m~ in resolution. Compare that to GPS, which has a nominal resolution of 3m with 15 satellites, or about a foot, with a correction from ground relays. (I remember using a handheld device that would tell you how many you were connected to, and it stopped working once you were near a tree.) Gravimeters have been used by submarines since the 1980s.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravimetry

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    [–] 10 points 4 days ago* (1 child)

    Quantum nav... awww man, for a second I thought The Orville was back!

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