US Army Places $11M Bet on Austin-based GPS Alternative Tern
Tern, creating the future of positioning with its Independently-Derived Positioning System (IDPS™) software, led by Brett Harrison, Shaun Moore, Phil Reason, and Manuel Seelaus, has won a contract from the U.S. Army to deploy the startup’s low-cost GPS alternative tech.
The $11.26 million contract will see the Army use Tern’s navigation tech in vehicles, though the startup was tight-lipped on the exact scale of the deployment of what it calls “Google Maps for the battlefield.”
Navigating Without GPS.
The Army is turning to Tern as GPS disruptions increase, particularly in the Middle East and around Ukraine and Russia. The U.S. military has also been exploring GPS jamming and other resilient navigation technologies.
Tern’s approach uses data generated by modern vehicles, such as sensors and onboard systems, to enable navigation without relying on GPS. The technology is designed to provide a more resilient alternative when satellite-based positioning is unavailable or compromised.
“We’ve got a device that plugs into the diagnostics board of the vehicle, wired to a tablet, and then that tablet is the interface for the soldier to use, and we provide both the position and navigation and routing there for the soldier,” Tern co-founder and CEO Shaun Moore said in an interview.
Moore said Tern is “passively listening to” this information and not disrupting its flow in any way. Tern then uses “proprietary methods” to make the information usable for navigation. (He declined to go into specifics.)
“There is quite a bit of work that was done to get it to the point where we can just receive that information and then output latitude / longitude, so big effort by our team,” he said.
GPS-Free Positioning.
Tern’s system allows vehicles to determine their position independently using edge processing, making it useful on and off road, including environments such as tunnels and deserts. In one demonstration, co-founder Brett Harrison used the technology during a 1,300-mile drive from Austin to Laguna Beach, with Tern maintaining positioning throughout while traditional GPS reportedly dropped out dozens of times.
The system is also designed as a closed architecture, making it more than a backup to GPS. Because it does not rely on external positioning signals, it can be harder for adversaries to jam or disrupt.
“I don’t know that there is broad awareness on the fragility of the [GPS] system from a consumer standpoint,” Moore said. “I think people just see the blue dot on their phone and say it will always be there because it’s there now, right? Why wouldn’t it be there?”
As a military vet himself, Harrison said the Army contract is validating after Tern spent years proving that its tech works. He said his time in Afghanistan as part of a special operations task force is a big part of where the desire to solve this problem came from.
“From the very foundation of when we decided to embark upon this effort, we recognized it has to be actually deployable, actually scalable, and not a science project,” he said. “We weren’t interested in just seeing what we could prove. We wanted to make sure it actually was something that could get into the wild and serve a purpose”
𝐑𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐭𝐞 𝐇𝐢𝐫𝐞 𝐖𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐔𝐬: 𝐌𝐞𝐧𝐥𝐨 𝐓𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐭 helps technology companies hire exceptional remote talent from India. Build your team with carefully curated engineers, product leaders, designers, GTM professionals, and more. Learn More At: https://www.menlotimes.com/menlo-talent
