Raytheon to help DOD detect land mines and tunnels

Raytheon Co. will assist the Defense Department detect land mines under a $19 million contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The DARPA contract calls for Raytheon to develop and demonstrate technology that will help detect and locate buried land mines and tunnels.

In Raytheon’s plan, a laser radar vibration sensor, known as a ladar vibrometer, would reveal hidden targets by measuring ground-surface vibrations, and use electronic instructions to calculate and process the information, company officials said.

The technology demonstrator would integrate the vibrometer with acoustic and seismic sources for field-testing on a moving vehicle.

Nick Uros, vice president for advanced concepts and technology at Raytheon, cited the following examples of advanced technology that the company will employ for the Seismic and Acoustic Vibration Imaging program:

• A high-sensitivity ladar vibrometer with multiple parallel channels yielding 600 simultaneous pixels for broad area coverage.
• Initial military use of Raytheon’s Morphable Networked Micro-architecture processor, the world’s first computer whose architecture can adopt different forms depending on the application.
• Advanced algorithms developed for the vibrometer while compensating for vehicle, structural and acoustic vibrations.
  

Raytheon, of Waltham, Mass., ranks No. 4 on Washington Technology’s 2008 Top 100 list of the largest federal government prime contractors.