Hypersonics Position, Navigation, and Timing Weapon System Improvements (HPNT-WSI)
Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) Crane seeks to expand its partnership with traditional and nontraditional industry sources to identify solutions for weapons system Position, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) accuracy opportunities and execute rapid demonstration for potential inclusion to a fielded program portfolio. The intent is to identify, accelerate maturity, and demonstrate technologies in simulated lab environments and onboard development flight tests. Upon development and successful demonstration, NSWC Crane will consider the technologies for program portfolio inclusion.
Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) Crane seeks to expand its partnership with traditional and nontraditional industry sources to identify solutions for weapons system Position, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) accuracy opportunities and execute rapid demonstration for potential inclusion to a fielded program portfolio. The intent is to identify, accelerate maturity, and demonstrate technologies in simulated lab environments and onboard development flight tests. Upon development and successful demonstration, NSWC Crane will consider the technologies for program portfolio inclusion.
Current navigation systems are heavily reliant on GPS technology for both commercial and military applications. While GPS has become a pervasive technology for military uses, it has security and availability challenges. This creates a need to explore alternative technology solutions such as one that utilizes terrestrial imagery that may be available worldwide to provide navigation accuracy comparable to GPS. Additionally, improved accuracy of the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) (reduction in uncompensated drift) over the mission profile within constrained size, weight and power (SWAP) will reduce reliance on GPS or alternative sources for PNT corrections. All solutions must perform in target environments that range from onset of hypersonic regimes at Mach 5 to traditional reentry regimes experienced by the Space Shuttle, for example, nearing Mach 25. Each technology will be utilized in naval applications and needs to be suitable for shipboard and submarine use. Each technology will utilize existing system hardware.
Areas of interest for the solicitation are Optical Terrain Correlation as an alternate source for PNT, and IMU Drift Correlation improvements via improved machine learning (ML) supplemented algorithms. In both cases the desire is to improve the performance or utilization of existing system hardware via algorithms and onboard processing.
The HPNT-WSI Other Transaction Authority (OTA) prototype project will support multiple Request For Solutions over a 24-month period.
