Mary-Louise Hoffman
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has awarded Rockwell Collins a contract of an undisclosed value to help develop navigation backup methods and tools for military use.
Rockwell Collins said Thursday it aims to produce technologies for warfighters to leverage communication systems without relying on GPS through the agency’s Spatial, Temporal and Orientation Information in Contested Environments project.
“The time-transfer and ranging capabilities we are developing seek to enable distributed platforms to cooperatively locate targets, employ jamming in a surgical fashion and serve as a backup to GPS for relative navigation,” said John Borghese, vice president of Rockwell’s advanced technology center.
Borghese added he believes STOIC technology can aid in autonomous aerial refueling, cooperative navigation and collision avoidance operations.
The GPS-independent platform will be built to employ reference signals, tactical clocks and multifunctional systems intended to transmit positioning, navigation and timing information within contested zones.
