The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has selected Rockwell Collins to develop architectures and techniques that reduce war fighter dependence on GPS.

As part of DARPA's Spatial, Temporal and Orientation Information in Contested Environments (STOIC) program, Rockwell Collins will research relative positioning accuracy, navigation and picosecond-accurate timing technology to augment or substitute for GPS in multifunctional communication system solutions.

"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 the Rockwell Collins Advanced Technology Center, in a news release.

The development of long-range robust reference signals and ultra-stable tactical clocks could aid future moving platform operations including networking in contested environments, autonomous aerial refueling and cooperative navigation and collision avoidance within unmanned aerial vehicle swarms, added Borghese.

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