US Army awards $11M contract to Austin startup Tern for GPS-free navigation
The US Army has signed an $11.26 million contract with Austin-based startup Tern to deploy its low-cost, GPS-independent navigation technology in military vehicles. The system analyzes vehicle-generated data to determine location even when GPS signals are jammed or unavailable.
The U.S. Army has awarded an $11.26 million contract to Austin-based startup Tern for its low-cost alternative to GPS navigation. The technology will be deployed in Army vehicles, though the company has not disclosed the exact scale of the rollout. Tern describes its system as "Google Maps for the battlefield."
Why it matters
The contract comes as GPS disruptions become increasingly common worldwide, particularly in the Middle East and in the airspace over Ukraine and Russia. The U.S. military itself has reportedly experimented with GPS jamming, which may have contributed to a deadly medevac plane crash earlier this year. Both Congress and President Trump, during his first term, have pushed efforts to develop resilient navigation technology that doesn't depend on GPS for military use.
How the technology works
Tern's system uses the data a vehicle naturally generates while driving to determine its position without relying on GPS. A device connects to the vehicle's diagnostics port and links to a tablet that serves as the soldier's interface, providing positioning, navigation and routing. Co-founder and CEO Shaun Moore said the system "passively listens" to this vehicle data without interfering with it, then applies proprietary methods to convert the information into usable latitude and longitude coordinates.
The approach allows a vehicle to determine its own position independently through edge processing, which works both on- and off-road, including in tunnels or deserts. Co-founder Brett Harrison recently tested the system on a 1,300-mile drive from Austin to Laguna Beach, California, during which it never lost track of his vehicle's position, while traditional GPS cut out repeatedly along the way.
Harrison, a military veteran who served in Afghanistan with a special operations task force, noted that because the system is closed, it functions not merely as a backup but as a technology that is inherently harder for adversaries to disrupt.
