When I recently set out for the Pentagon’s R&D department, I instead found myself in front of a downtrodden shopping mall in Arlington, Virginia. I’d been navigating the old fashioned way—with my eyes—but when I pulled out my smartphone there it was, clearly marked in the Google Maps app: DARPA. It turns out that the[…]
The technology used to plan military missions and navigate in unfamiliar environments has changed dramatically for soldiers in the past 20 years. From paper maps and shortwave radios in the 1990s to accessing real-time data on smartphones today, warfighters can carry out missions with more efficiency than ever before. One way this is made[…]
Forget about muddling through with folded paper maps and line-of-sight radio comms. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has been building a library of mission-critical apps, such as updated digital maps with interactive features, which troops on foot can access from secure Android devices. Called Transformative Apps, or TransApps, the DARPA program has fielded more[…]
The hardened version of the Android operating system that the Defense Department is developing originated from research into improving the security of mobile devices for military use. Work on the hardened Android kernel is a part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Transformative Apps program, which seeks to develop new DOD software applications through an innovative development and acquisition[…]