Quantum assisted GPS would be one thousand times more accurate than any existing GPS and other high potential DARPA projects

DARPA director Arati Prabhakar highlighted four technology projects in her recent testimony (19 page PDF) to the Senate Appropriations Committee look like a list of insider favorites.

New Frontiers

Consistent with our mission to prevent technological surprise by creating it, DARPA continues to invest across a wide range of fields where we see promising research that could lead to powerful technology capability. These investments are the seeds of what my successors, perhaps 5,10, or 15 years from now, will be describing to you as technology revolutions

Atomic GPS one thousand times more accurate than any current GPS with a prototype expected by 2019

The Global Positioning System, or GPS, which DARPA had an important but limited role in developing, is a great tool but maintaining it as a satellite system is increasingly costly. A modern GPS satellite can run into the range of $223 million, which is one reason why the Air Force recently scaled back its procurement.

DARPA doesn’t have an explicit program to replace GPS, but the DARPA-funded chip-scale combinatorial atomic navigation, or C-SCAN, and Quantum Assisted Sensing, or QuASAR, initiatives explore a field of research with big relevance here: the use of atomic physics for much better sensing. If you can measure or understand how the Earth’s magnetic field acceleration and position is effecting individual atoms (reduced in temperature), you can navigate without a satellite. In fact, you can achieve geo-location awareness that could be 1,000 times more accurate than any system currently in existence.

The British military is investing millions of pounds in a similar technology. Researchers associated with the project forecast that they will have a prototype ready within five years.

A drone with a quantum compass wouldn’t require satellite navigation, which would make it much easier to fly and less hackable.

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