Raytheon BBN Technologies wins force protection award

Raytheon BBN Technologies has announced that it has been awarded a contract by the US Air Force Research Laboratory under the Force Protection programme. The contract, worth $1.9 million, was announced 8 May, 2012.

Under the contract, Raytheon BBN will enhance the force protection kit – networks of sensors that are used to alert troops to potential dangers - for the programme in a number of ways, with a platform to extend the reach of the kits, particularly for mobile and dismounted troops.

According to the company, it will conduct work to ‘enable force protection kits to use sensors that are beyond their immediate line-of-sight, giving troops on patrol and commanders outside the immediate reach of the force protection kits access to data from more distant sensors’. They will also carry out collaborative work to develop adaptations so that troops have greater protection when they are outside their bases or vehicles.

The company said it will also carry out work on automatic archiving, to make collected data more immediately searchable and retrievable for review purposes; as well as adding tagging, retrieval and search applications to video, traditional text, and image data. In addition, the new platform will ‘support information ferrying to and from remote locations via unmanned aerial vehicles’ in situations where sending information by satellite is too slow.

Raytheon said its work will help troops to access information, and improve their reach-back to command and control centres, ‘helping them to make more informed decisions and enabling better mission planning and threat responses’.