The developer of quantum sensing technologies SandboxAQ today announced a breakthrough navigational platform designed as a backup when the global positioning system is jammed or otherwise not available.

The new system, called AQNav, combines advanced quantum sensors and artificial intelligence algorithms along with a map of the Earth’s magnetic field to provide an unjammable, all-weather, real-time navigation solution that can work even when GPS is unavailable or spoofed.

“The intentional disruption of this transformational technology by nation-states and others puts human lives at risk and impacts governments and economies,” said Jack D. Hidary, chief executive of SandboxAQ. “Working closely with our public- and private-sector partners, SandboxAQ has used AI and quantum tech to create a safe, secure navigation alternative to supplement GPS.”

GPS is used in numerous industries, including by the military, aviation, agriculture and emerging sectors such as autonomous vehicles and drones. Among the biggest threats to GPS are jamming and spoofing, two different types of attacks that can cause disruption and problems for the system.

“Jammers are things that can be purchased relatively easily because the technology is pretty rudimentary,” Luca Ferrara, general manager of navigation at SandboxAQ, told SiliconANGLE in an interview. “You’re essentially just emitting a lot of electromagnetic noise in radio frequency and so much RF noise that it overcomes and clouds out the receivers so that they can’t pick up the actual signal anymore.”

Jammers are so easy to purchase that a truck driver accidentally jammed the GPS signal at Newark Liberty International Airport in 2013, when he activated a GPS jammer so that his bosses couldn’t track his vehicle. Although usually GPS jamming is targeted at military aircraft, civilian aircraft often become causalities caught in the midst of this electronic warfare, posing safety risks. This can be seen in recent headlines revealing that Russia is suspected of jamming the GPS of fights arriving in the U.K. passing over the Baltic Sea given regional tension involved in the Russia-Ukraine war.

Spoofing involves taking advantage of tricking a target into thinking that a satellite has sent a signal that it has not. This could cause the GPS navigation on board an aircraft or seagoing vessel to indicate it’s somewhere it isn’t, potentially causing it to go off course or run into more catastrophic problems.

AQNav’s quantum sensors take advantage of the Zeeman effect and an optically pumped magnetometer, where laser light is used to change the quantum state of electrons to sense magnetic fields. The Zeeman effect creates specific spectral lines of light changed into numbers, which are then essentially turned into a point that can be mapped onto the Earth’s magnetosphere using AI processing, explained Ferrara.

“This is where you’re using intelligently designed and architected machine learning networks that can usefully pick out your needle from the haystack,” Ferrara said. “Because a quantum sensor is very sensitive, right? So, it picks up all sorts of stuff, only some of which is what your actual signal is for your application.”

For example, he added, “If you’re trying to do medical devices, you might be trying to pay attention to a really faint, really nearby signal. If you are doing what we do, you’re trying to match to Earth. So you don’t want to pay attention to nearby faint signals. You want to pay attention to far away, strong signals. ”

In January 2023, the U.S. Air Force awarded SandboxAQ a research contract to explore its geomagnetic navigation system. By May 2023, it completed its first flight tests during Exercise Golden Phoenix and also flight-tested it in August 2023 during Exercise Mobility Guardian. In addition to working with the USAF, SandboxAQ has also worked with other aerospace industry leaders, including Boeing and Acubed, the research and innovation center of European national aerospace corporation Airbus SE.

“As a licensed jet pilot with many hours of flight time, I appreciate how much we rely on GPS for navigation,”said Eric Schmidt, chairman of SandboxAQ and former chairman and chief executive of Alphabet Inc. “Our national defense relies upon GPS in the air, on land and at sea. The global civilian airspace relies upon this system. Given the ease of jamming and spoofing GPS, it is critical to have a global supplementary navigation system that works with inertial systems — this is what SandboxAQ has developed with AQNav.”

When it comes down to bare value, AQNav is another type of navigation system that is designed to augment GPS, not outright replace it. Magnetic field navigation works in a lot of situations but not all the time, and it’s also all-weather unaffected by temperature and not dependent on the availability of satellites. What it does for aerospace and autonomous vehicles is add an extra layer of resiliency by covering the gaps of other navigational capabilities.

“If you think about how much more safety matters for air travel, and the desire to make air travel more autonomous, or for the militaries of the world to use more autonomy,” said Ferrara. “If you take a human out of the loop, you need even more redundancies and more resiliency than when you had a human in the loop. And so, the emphasis on having these types of fallbacks is only going up.”

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