AUSA 2024: US Army weighs full-rate production for MAPS by year end

The Collins Aerospace NavHub-100 (part of its MAPS Gen II solution) installed in a vehicle. (Collins Aerospace)

Senior US Army officials are poised to move the Mounted Assured, Positioning, Navigation and Timing System Generation II (MAPS Gen II) into full-rate production by the end of 2024, industry officials say.

Programme officials at Collins Aerospace, a Raytheon subsidiary, have already transitioned to full rate production at their MAPS Gen II facilities in anticipation of the approval by the Program Executive Office Command, Control, Communications, and Network (PEO-C3N), Philippe Limondin, vice-president of Resilient Navigation Solutions at Collins Aerospace, said.

Announced in September 2022 Collins Aerospace was awarded an Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) production contract for the army's MAPS Gen II programme, with a ceiling value of USD583 million.

Consisting of the NavHub-100 and the Multi-Sensor Antenna System (MSAS-100), the MAPS Gen II is capable of fusing data from disparate platform nodes such as global navigation satellite services (GNSS), inertial measurement units (IMUs), celestial navigation, or optical tracking. The data is then processed on platform and data irregularities or anomalies filtered out, resulting in the Assured Positioning, Navigation and Timing (APNT) solution.

As programme officials prepare for full-rate production approval, development is ongoing on additional capabilities to either augment current MAPS variants or to be integrated into future versions of the system, Limondin said during an 8 October interview ahead of the Association of the United States Army (AUSA) 2024 annual symposium in Washington, DC.

“We've been focused on the broader [Combined Joint All-Domain Awareness] picture and integrated the AN/PRC-162 two-channel manpack [radio] with our MAPS system,” according to Limondin.