Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Army orders $73M worth of BBN’s Boomerangs

By Mass High Tech Staff

Storied technology research and development firm BBN Technologies Corp. won a $73.8 million contract from the U.S. Army for thousands of its new Boomerang wearable shot-detection systems.

The U.S. Army’s Communications and Electronics Command (CECOM) ordered 8,131 Boomerang systems, along with spares and training services from Cambridge-based BBN. The contract is expected to be completed by June 10, 2009, according to the U.S. Department of Defense.

In October 2007 the U.S. Army Soldier Systems Center in Natick awarded BBN the contract to develop the wearable Boomerang, based on the company’s Boomerang technology, which typically mounted on vehicles such as Humvees.

Founded in 1948, BBN is well-known for its role in the development of the ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet. BBN specializes in acoustic technology, speech recognition, secure computing and data mining.