SandboxAQ has officially announced the launch of a series containing scientific and technical milestone publications on magnetic anomaly-based navigation (MagNav), showcasing a set of significant advances in the company’s core research and product development activities for its AQNav offering.
According to certain reports, the stated series actually builds upon the company’s impressive track record with the U.S. Air Force (USAF). This track record markedly includes the successful use of AQNav for real-time navigation in GPS-denied environments, as well as the TACFI contract extension to develop new configurations for a wider range of USAF aircraft. When packed together, the stated publications tread up a long distance to relay SandboxAQ’s contributions to commercial aeronautical, defense, and academic research communities over the past three years.
More on the same would reveal how the company and its MagNav partners, including the USAF, Acubed (a subsidiary of Airbus) and Boeing, have delivered substantial scientific and engineering advancements required to commercialize the underlying quantum sensing and AI technologies that enable accurate, real-time navigation without reliance on GPS.
Talk about those advancements on a slightly deeper level, we begin from how they have completed more than 200 flight hours and more than 40 sorties across multiple regions on four different aircraft types, ranging in size from single-engine planes to large military transport aircraft. Next up, they have conducted successful flight tests in two USAF exercises i.e. Exercise Golden Phoenix and Exercise Mobility Guardian in 2023.
Not just that, they have also conducted more of those USAF flight tests in 2024, utilizing AQNav to demonstrate its generalizability and scalability across large aircraft fleets, while simultaneously completing successful commercial flight tests on Airbus and Boeing aircraft.
“Global Navigation Satellite Systems are increasingly vulnerable to denial, jamming and spoofing, creating critical challenges for accurate civilian, commercial and military navigation and positioning. The growing global scourge of GPS interference underscores the critical need for accurate, alternative Positioning, Navigation, and Timing systems that can integrate with existing navigational systems yet operate independently of GNSS,” said SandboxAQ advisor Admiral John M. Richardson. “SandboxAQ’s AQNav takes a system-of-systems approach to secure, real-time positioning and navigation. Leveraging advanced Large Quantitative Models, powerful magnetometers, and Earth’s crustal magnetic field, AQNav delivers robust, redundant and reliable navigation capabilities.”
Beyond that, SandboxAQ has also made significant contributions to the scientific understanding and practical application of magnetic navigation technology through a series of recent publications.
These publications include a paper by Aditya Gupta et al called Lower Bounds on Magnetic Navigation Performance as a Function of Magnetic Anomaly Map Quality, which was presented at the October 2024 Digital Avionics Systems Conference. There, it established a theoretical framework for assessing the impact of magnetic map quality on navigation performance. This work, having received a Best in Session Award, basically offers valuable insights for developing and optimizing magnetic navigation systems.
Another paper in play was put together by Jackson Bell et al. Named as Determining Geophysical Map Requirements for Magnetic Navigation using Cramér Rao Lower Bound Analysis, the stated paper was presented at the December 2024 American Geophysical Union conference and it explored the specific requirements for geophysical maps needed for accurate magnetic navigation.
The stated work helps define the data collection and processing strategies necessary for successful implementation of the technology.
Founded in 2021, SandboxAQ’s rise up the ranks stems from its Large Quantitative Models (LQMs) that deliver critical advances in defense, life science, chemical and material science, financial services, navigation, cyber and other sectors. The company’s excellence in what it does can also be understood once you consider it is currently backed by the likes of T. Rowe Price, Eric Schmidt, Breyer Capital, Guggenheim Partners, Marc Benioff, Thomas Tull, Section32, and others.
“Our team has been setting the pace in advancing magnetic anomaly-based navigation, from establishing statistical rigor around performance and map quality to shaping requirements for magnetic maps,” said Luca Ferrara, SandboxAQ’s General Manager of Navigation. “We’ve also pioneered AI-driven techniques using Liquid Neural Networks for signal processing and space weather compensation, and demonstrated the generalizability of our models across aircraft types in operational settings with the USAF.”
