BAE Systems has been awarded a cost-plus-fixed-fee contract by the US Air Force Research Laboratory to develop airborne processing and sensor system hardware and software.

The $11.3m contract also includes developing storage, chipping, dissemination, and processing control for real-time on-board detection and tracking of over 20,000 of dismounts and vehicles over a wide area.

The company will integrate the tracker with the wide-area motion imaging (WAMI) sensor as well as communications links to the ground station.

The ground processing software will also be developed to support exploitation of WAMI downlink video and ancillary data.