TERN wins $11.26m to give Army vehicles a position without GPS

Somewhere in a motor pool, a driver is going to look at a position on a screen with the GPS antenna useless and decide whether to act on it. TERN's release describes the Independently Derived Positioning System as continuously deriving and maintaining a vehicle's position independently of GPS and other external RF signals, and feeding that to the operator and to command-and-control systems ^[2]. It gives no accuracy figure and no account of which sensors do the deriving ^[9].

The case for buying it is documented. Operations in Ukraine and the Middle East have shown GPS and other satellite navigation signals interfered with, spoofed, denied and attacked by electronic warfare ^[7]. "All of the space between a vehicle and the satellites orbiting Earth represents an opportunity to disrupt or degrade the GPS signal," said Brett Harrison, TERN's president and co-founder ^[8].

The positioning system is what the announcement is about. The other half of the contract is the Vehicle Health & Maintenance System. It monitors vehicle condition and operational readiness and merges it with location data, so commanders see fleet status inside command environments they already use ^[4].

TERN got here through the Army's xTechOverWatch program, selected from more than 600 applicants, then a Direct-to-Phase II SBIR contract awarded after an evaluation involving soldiers ^[5]. A Phase III award followed through Army FUZE and the Technology Maturation Initiative, and by the company's account the whole path ran under a year ^[6]. "This award demonstrates what is possible when soldiers, acquisition leaders, and emerging technology companies have a clear path from operational experimentation to scaled fielding," said Shaun Moore, TERN's CEO and co-founder ^[10]. The release does not say whether the $11.26m is that Phase III award or a separate action ^[15]. It names no vehicle quantity, no delivery schedule and no split of the money between the two systems ^[12]. Both quoted executives are TERN co-founders, and no Army official is quoted ^[13].

For whoever has to accept this on a vehicle, two questions do the work. The first: how far the vehicle can move without external signals before the derived position leaves the tolerance the mission needs. The second: whether the crew is told when that has happened. Soldiers evaluated the system during the xTechOverWatch phase ^[5], so someone in the program has seen the first number. The announcement states neither ^[9].