Acubed and SandboxAQ Announce Groundbreaking Developments in Magnetic Navigation for Aviation Safety
SandboxAQ and Acubed, Airbus’ Silicon Valley research center, have revealed impressive advancements in quantum magnetic navigation (MagNav), marking a major step towards improving aircraft safety and resilience. These developments, which are focused on their AI-powered AQNav system, are set to usher in a new era of intelligent automation in the skies by providing a strong defense against the escalating global problem of GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) denial, jamming, and spoofing.
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Addressing a Critical Global Challenge
Disruptions in GNSS can endanger flight operations and safety worldwide, making the aviation sector more susceptible. The intense research and development efforts underpinning AQNav have been motivated by this urgent concern. The quantum sensors at the core of AQNav were developed in 2021 by SandboxAQ, a leader in quantum technology. As one of TIME’s Best Inventions of 2024 and selected by ACT-IAC for the 2025 Innovations Champion Award, the system has already received a great deal of attention.
Like a distinct geophysical fingerprint, AQNav uses sophisticated quantum magnetometers to “read” the Earth’s crustal magnetic anomalies. In order to guarantee accuracy, it uses Large Quantitative Models (LQMs) to efficiently remove electromagnetic interference, making it possible to pinpoint an aircraft’s location without relying on satellite signals.
Rigorous Testing and Unprecedented Accuracy
Since 2022, SandboxAQ has worked closely with Acubed, the U.S. Air Force (USAF), and other partners to thoroughly test and improve AQNav. The technology was recently accepted into the 2025 NATO DIANA cohort, an effort aimed at further refining its capabilities, after showcasing its real-time navigation skills during USAF flight testing last July.
The findings of a nationwide project with Acubed’s Flight Lab, which was created especially to test the navigational accuracy of AQNav, represent a significant milestone that was disclosed today. Determining whether magnetic anomaly-aided navigation could satisfy the aviation industry’s strict Required Navigation Performance (RNP) standards was one of the main goals. These requirements are essential for the system’s future implementation on military, commercial, and passenger aircraft.
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Even on the longest flights, AQNav’s capabilities clearly outperformed the accuracy needed for en route travel between airports, demonstrating its exceptional precision in the testing. Flight data was gathered, reprocessed, and streamed in real time to guarantee the system’s real-time viability under real-world operational circumstances. This provided insightful statistical information for collaborative team assessment.
Demonstrating Real-World Robustness
The operational realism ingrained in their design is what distinguishes these test outcomes. Acubed and SandboxAQ purposefully designed tests to replicate the “noisy, messy, and unpredictable environments real pilots face every day,” said AQNav’s technical engagement manager, Elijha Williams. These robust tests’ salient features included:
- Standard Aircraft Platform: Instead of using a specialized geosurvey platform, AQNav was tested on a publicly accessible conventional Beechcraft Baron 58. In order to integrate AQNav instrumentation, the aircraft was only slightly altered; substantial electromagnetic shielding or specialized noise isolation was purposefully avoided. AQNav’s software ensured a clean magnetic signal in spite of internal interference, and all sensors were placed strategically throughout the aircraft.
- Publicly Available Magnetic Map: Researchers used the North American Magnetic Anomaly Map (NAMAM) for all flights, covering the US, Canada, Mexico, and oceanic regions.
- Unfiltered Flight Paths: Flight operations spanned more than 200 airports throughout the continental United States on a variety of operationally significant routes. Crucially, a real test of the system’s flexibility was ensured by not filtering the routes according to favorable geomagnetic gradients, map quality, or magnetic anomaly strength. Data from more than 150 flying hours was gathered.
- Diverse Geophysical Environments: To accurately portray the diverse geographies where aircraft operate without GNSS, data was gathered throughout a wide spectrum of situations, from scarcely featured plains to magnetically-rich mountainous regions.
- True Operational Noise Handling: Critically, AQNav successfully filtered out real-world interference generated by the aircraft itself, including electromagnetic, vibrational, and other airframe-induced noise.
AQNav consistently outperformed the Inertial Navigation System (INS) without GNSS 100% of the time during test flights longer than two hours. In a particularly remarkable achievement, AQNav reported its best-observed accuracy of less than 74 meters, or roughly two-thirds the length of an American football pitch, during a one-hour flight over difficult mountainous and forested terrain in California.
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SandboxAQ AQNav
The first dual-use magnetic navigation system, SandboxAQ, provides real-time positioning data straight to an iPad on a U.S. Air Force (USAF) aircraft. It has a unique roll-on/roll-off functionality and provides live position information during uncontrolled, operational flights.
SandboxAQ was given a Direct-to-Phase-II Small Business Innovation Research contract by the USAF in 2023 to investigate magnetic anomaly navigation. Eight months ahead of schedule, it successfully finished the AQNav system’s initial flight tests. It has the biggest Magnetic Navigation database known to the public. From single-engine civilian planes to huge military transport aircraft, AQNav has flown 40 missions and 200 hours in four aircraft. There will be more flight tests soon.
Acubed, Airbus’s research and innovation center in Silicon Valley, Boeing, and other allied nations have expressed interest in AQNav in addition to the USAF. These companies are now evaluating the technology at different stages.
How AQNav Works
AQNav gathers data from Earth’s crustal magnetic field, which has immutable patterns that are geographically distinct and like human fingerprints, using incredibly sensitive quantum magnetometers.
The system can quickly and precisely determine its position by comparing this data with known magnetic maps using proprietary AI algorithms. AI algorithms are used to increase the signal-to-noise ratio and eliminate any mechanical, electrical, or other interference that can affect the system’s capacity to determine its location because quantum sensors are extremely sensitive.
- Unjammable/Unspoofable Worldwide Signal: Given the omnipresence and unjammability of Earth’s crustal magnetic field, it offers unrestricted access and a reliable, enduring signal from any point.
- All-Weather: AQNav works well as a supplement to other navigation methods because it is not affected by the weather or lighting.
- Terrain Agnostic: AQNav is a useful tool for navigation in the air, over open sea, on distant terrain, and even underwater or underground because it does not require visual ground features.
- Passive Technology: To lessen a vehicle’s detectability, AQNav passively absorbs geomagnetic data without emitting or reflecting any signals.
- Versatile, Adaptable Technology: AQNav may be integrated into a wide range of platforms, including single-engine aircraft and multi-engine airliners, and it runs at room temperature without the need for shielding.
- Seamless Integration: To guarantee safe and precise navigation, AQNav may interface with current navigation systems, such as inertial, visual, satellite, and other cutting-edge technologies, forming a “system of systems.”
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Paving the Way for a GNSS-Independent Future
The broad use of AQNav in aviation has advanced significantly as a result of this massive endeavor. SandboxAQ has conclusively proven AQNav’s feasibility and actual operational robustness in real-world circumstances by sustaining constant accuracy throughout an uncontrolled, unfiltered national testbed.
According to SandboxAQ’s quantum navigation machine learning engineer, Andrew Sosa Sosanya, the “highly relevant MagNav dataset” produces a “flywheel effect: the more data it collects, the faster it improves model accuracy across diverse mission profiles,” underscoring the strategic significance of the data gathered.
The campaign demonstrated AQNav’s scalability, which is crucial for the aviation industry’s future, in addition to its remarkable performance metrics. According to the insider, “scaling is where real progress happens,” even though single-flight demos are crucial proofs of concept. Development and validation were accelerated by the effective data collecting and analysis at scale made possible by Acubed’s Flight Lab. Faster technology maturity and richer insights into global performance are made possible by this agile platform, which dramatically increases data collecting in realistic operational scenarios.
SandboxAQ staff systems engineer Eddie Rodriguez emphasized the importance of the collaboration: “AQNav’s recent results have been greatly aided by the relationship with Acubed. It was able to enhance navigation accuracy, speed up hardware and software iterations, and even characterize aircraft electromagnetic interference noise profiles for future advancements to their flight planning experience and quick feedback loops. Acubed’s adaptability in ground tests and EMI surveys “enriched the data pool significantly, pushing the boundaries of sensor placement and denoising capabilities for the next-gen devices,” agreed SandboxAQ embedded systems engineer Saurabh Kuruvila.
SandboxAQ and its partners are bringing aviation one step closer to a future in which GNSS is just one of many tools for accurate navigation, rather than a single point of failure that may endanger lives and affect vital military and commercial operations with each hour and sortie flown. Continued cooperation with government and commercial partners is speeding up the implementation of MagNav systems driven by AI and quantum technology.
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