The Pentagon’s scientists are adding funding heft and focus to the growing research effort on how quantum sensors can provide localized position, navigation, and timing (PNT) data to supplement or even replace hackable and jammable space-based GPS and other radio receivers.
Earlier this year, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, launched its new Robust Quantum Sensors program. It seeks to solve fundamental engineering challenges that have hampered the transition of quantum sensing from the laboratory to the battlefield, program manager Jonathan Hoffman told Air & Space Forces Magazine.
But the program also aims to address a more esoteric problem: how to get innovative new technology like quantum sensors funded by the Defense Department’s massive and sometimes byzantine acquisition system.
Phase one invites companies and research institutions to offer proposals to prove out engineering solutions for quantum sensors that detect tiny changes in “electric fields, magnetic fields, acceleration, rotation, [and] gravity,” said Hoffman.
Measuring gravitational or magnetic fields in one place, and then comparing that to detailed maps of the earth’s fields has been called quantum orienteering, because of its resemblance to map-based location techniques using physical landmarks.
It can provide localized alternative PNT data if GPS is denied by enemy jamming. The DARPA solicitation also covers quantum devices that receive radio frequency (RF) signals.
In phase two, Hoffman said, the program will seek to match any successful engineering solutions from phase one with a military platform, like a tank, ship or aircraft, on which engineers can integrate their solutions. If the match is successful, the program office for the tank, ship, or aircraft can start buying the devices right away, providing a robust income stream and carrying the successful teams over the notorious “Valley of Death,” the long and sometimes fatal interval between developing a technology and getting paid to deliver it to warfighters.
“In phase two, we want to rapidly transition this to acquisition programs of record, and the successful teams in phase one will be invited to propose to actually integrate onto a program of record platform,” Hoffman said, adding that a technical team from the government would look for possible matches.
A key to making that happen is developing tech that can stand up to the harsh conditions of the battlespace. Prototypes for phase one are meant to be inherently robust, Hoffman said.
Current engineering approaches to quantum sensing creates the most sensitive instruments possible—the ones that work best in the laboratory—and then rely on “band aids” to mitigate interference, said Hoffman.
“So I’ll place my really exquisite sensor at the end of a boom on this aircraft to get it far away from all of the electronics on board that cause interference,” he said. “Or I’ll put a giant bunch of cancellation coils in place. … Each of those band aids can maybe work for a specific platform, but it’s not generalizable.”
“This program is not about band aids,” Hoffman said at a DARPA proposers day. “This program is about overcoming these challenges at the sensor level.”
He stressed that DARPA doesn’t want to be prescriptive about technical approaches. “We’re open to any idea that achieves the metrics,” he said.
In phase one, the competing teams spend the first 12 months building a prototype. Then DARPA will spend the next 18 months testing it on a helicopter.
“The metric [for success] is very simple for phase one,” Hoffman told the audience of industry and academic researchers. “Maintain your state-of-the-art sensitivity throughout a helicopter flight. That’s it.”
If a quantum sensor can work on a helicopter, it can work pretty much anywhere, he told Air & Space Forces Magazine.
“We chose one of the harshest platform environments we could think of, in terms of interference that we’ve seen being problems for quantum sensors, like [electrical] fields, field grids, and vibrations.”
Successful competitors will emerge from phase one with platform-agnostic technology, Hoffman said. “We want to make sure that everyone’s exposed to these environments to prove that their concept works, and we can integrate it onto any platform in the future.”
By producing platform agnostic devices, Hoffman said, the program aims to collapse “the technology development chain” making it unnecessary to re-engineer the same technology multiple times for different platforms.
“If we can close the gap on all of that, we can rapidly go from concept to fielded acquisition device, and that’s one of the really difficult experiments we’re trying to run in this program,” he said, adding “We’re very hopeful and optimistic that it will be successful.”
The solicitation is open until March 30.