Move over GPS, there’s a new navigation system in town and it’s out of this world! Japanese researchers have developed a wireless navigation system that uses cosmic rays, or muons, instead of radio waves. Unlike GPS, which can’t penetrate buildings, rocks, or water, muons can travel through even kilometers of rock, making them the perfect solution for underground, indoor, and underwater navigation. The system, called the muometric positioning system (muPS), has already been successfully tested and could be used by search and rescue teams to guide robots underwater or help autonomous vehicles navigate underground. Muons have been used for imaging archaeological structures, detecting illegally transported nuclear materials, and monitoring active volcanoes. The Muographix system relies on four muon-detecting reference stations above ground serving as coordinates for the muon-detecting receivers, which are deployed either underground or underwater. The team’s latest version, the muometric wireless navigation system (MuWNS), is completely wireless and uses high-precision quartz clocks to synchronize the ground stations with the receiver. While still not at a practical level, with accuracy ranging from 2 to 25 meters, the team foresees incorporating commercially available chip-scale atomic clocks in the future to achieve one-meter accuracy. Watch the video to learn more about this exciting new technology!
On Wednesday, researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) announced their successful test of a novel wireless cosmic ray navigation system that could revolutionize the way we travel in unknown or deeply entrenched terrain.
This system, called RayNav, utilizes sensors placed in the subsurface to detect cosmic rays that naturally penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere from deep space. By using machine learning algorithms to analyze the data from these sensors, RayNav can accurately triangulate a person’s position relative to these sensors.
The RayNav system has many potential applications, such as enabling underground rescue teams to locate trapped miners and survivors in collapsed buildings. The system could also be used for autonomous navigation, allowing robots, drones and other vehicles to move accurately and precisely in areas with limited or no GPS coverage.
In the recent field test, the research team led by Professor James Winkler from the Physical Science Division of the Jacobs School of Engineering placed several sensors in a forest near the university. The test participants, equipped with a custom RayNav-tracked vest, were then asked to walk in the forest without any visible markers or targets. Despite the challenging terrain, the participants wearing the RayNav vests managed to arrive at their intended destination with an accuracy of up to one meter.
This successful test demonstrated the potential of RayNav to improve existing navigation technologies. “The ability to navigate accurately in areas where traditional navigational systems, such as global positioning satellites, don’t work opens up many possibilities,” said Professor Winkler. “We plan to continue refining the RayNav system to provide even greater accuracy and reliability in the future.”
