Quantum-Sensing and Machine Learning based Navigation System for Hypersonic Weapons

There is a push to develop navigation systems that can work when Global Positioning System (GPS) is not available due to many reasons, e.g., adversary anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) technology, and hypersonic conditions (i.e., plasma sheaths that block communication). The standard navigation approach when GPS is available is to use a combination of Inertial Measurement Units (IMU) and GPS measurements for continuous positioning. IMU data is used for prediction and GPS is used to update the position estimates. In the absence of GPS, alternative sensing methods are used with IMU data to estimate the position. Such as, ranging from radio, vision, celestial, gravity, terrain matching, etc. However, each of these alternative technologies tends to work best in a certain environment or under specific conditions. To address this limitation, Spectral Energies, LLC (SE) proposes to develop a novel navigation system. The proposed system will use a fusion of inertial-based navigation that is enhanced with Machine Learning (ML) to reduce measurement errors and magnetic anomaly-based navigation that uses a quantum magnetic sensor to correct for drift and other errors that are not corrected with ML.