Monday, September 8, 2008

Army awards BBN $3.5M for wearable gunshot spotter system

BBN Technologies has landed $3.5 million from the U.S. Army for continued development of a wearable gunshot detection system in partnership with the Natick Soldier Systems Center, officials report.

The Cambridge company said it developed and demonstrated a prototype wearable system last year. The wearable systems are based on the technology underlying BBN’s Boomerang III shooter detection system, about 1,000 of which are deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, the company said.

In June, BBN landed a $74 million contract to deliver more than 8,000 Boomerang systems and spare parts to the Army before the end of the year. 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 is mounted on vehicles such as Humvees.

Last month, BBN landed $8.9 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for work on Phase 3 of DARPA’s disruption tolerant networking project. The DTN project is intended to develop network services that can deliver information even when terrain, weather, jamming and movement or destruction of nodes have interrupted the path of a message. Also in August, BBN took in $4.4 million from DARPA for work on the Scalable Network Monitoring program, intended to develop alert systems for threats to computer networks.

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.