Navigation

Using very small atoms to guide very large submarines, Q-CTRL has been awarded a contract by the Australian Department of Defence to develop quantum mechanics systems for the AUKUS treaty partners to navigate subs on long underwater missions.

GPS doesn’t work as well inside buildings, underground or underwater. Now engineers in Japan have developed and tested an alternative technology that uses cosmic rays to track movement beneath a building with precision of a few meters.

Garmin has added solar charging to its latest Edge bike computer, which boasts up to 100 hours of per-charge battery life, improved GPS accuracy, more ride analytics, easy setup out of the box and a refreshed user interface.

Because GPS doesn't work indoors, it can be difficult for robots to determine where they are within a structure. A new system could help, by using a building's existing Wi-Fi access points to guide wheeled or walking robots.

NASA and partners are developing backpack-sized technology for future Moon explorers that will allow them to map and navigate the lunar surface in the darkness of the high polar regions to within a centimeter without GPS.

Hot on the heels of Facebook's Ray-Ban Stories comes a pair of concept smart glasses from Chinese tech firm Xiaomi that don't just push notifications from a smartphone, but also sport some nifty independent functionality.

While many cyclists use apps such as Google Maps to navigate city streets, glancing down at that cluttered map display can be confusing. The Beeline Velo 2, however, is designed to keep things simple and easy to read.

Airtext has released a simple laser altimeter for small aircraft to make approaches and landings safer. The app-controlled Land-DAR (Land Distance and Ranging) is configured through an app and calls out altitudes as the aircraft descends.

ESA plans to use its upcoming Lunar Pathfinder mission to experiment with expanding sat nav coverage to the Moon. By tuning in to the Galileo and GPS satellite constellations, the goal is to provide more precise fixes for spacecraft in lunar orbit.

If the smart specs already on the market aren't enough to get you excited, why not make your own? That's exactly what electrical engineer and product designer Sam March has done, with the help of a CNC router and some app coding.

MIT scientists have developed an acoustic system that acts like an underwater GPS, yet doesn't need batteries to operate. The system is instead powered by modulated audio signals reflected from the environment to provide net-zero energy positioning info.

NASA's New Horizons deep-space probe has, for the first time, returned images to Earth that showed stellar parallax, or how the positions of stars shift when seen from two different places. This could one day be used for interstellar navigation.