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Defense Sciences Office (DSO)

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DARPA's Defense Sciences Office (DSO) identifies and pursues high-risk, high-payoff research initiatives across a broad spectrum of science and engineering disciplines and transforms them into important, new game-changing technologies for U.S. national security. Current DSO themes include frontiers in math, computation and design, limits of sensing and sensors, complex social systems, and anticipating surprise. DSO relies on the greater scientific research community to help identify and explore ideas that could potentially revolutionize the state-of-the-art.

Useful links to work with DSO

Highlights

AMD

Discovering New Molecules for Military Applications

The efficient discovery and production of new molecules is essential for a range of military capabilities—from developing safe chemical warfare agent simulants and medicines to counter emerging threats, to coatings, dyes, and specialty fuels for advanced performance. Current approaches to develop molecules for specific applications, however, are intuition-driven, mired in slow iterative design and test cycles, and ultimately limited by the specific molecular expertise of the chemist who has to test each candidate molecule by hand.
Artificial Intelligence Exploration (AIE)

Accelerating the Exploration of Promising Artificial Intelligence Concepts

DARPA today announced its Artificial Intelligence Exploration (AIE) program, a key component of the agency’s broader artificial intelligence (AI) investment strategy aimed at ensuring the United States maintains an advantage in this critical and rapidly accelerating technology area. AIE will constitute a series of unique funding opportunities that use streamlined contracting procedures and funding mechanisms to achieve a start date within three months of an opportunity announcement.
Fast Lightweight Autonomy (FLA)

Faster, Lighter, Smarter: DARPA Gives Small Autonomous Systems a Tech Boost

DARPA’s Fast Lightweight Autonomy (FLA) program recently completed Phase 2 flight tests, demonstrating advanced algorithms designed to turn small air and ground systems into team members that could autonomously perform tasks dangerous for humans – such as pre-mission reconnaissance in a hostile urban setting or searching damaged structures for survivors following an earthquake.

Tags

| Agency | Autonomy | Complexity | Fundamentals | Materials | Math | Sensors |

 

Opportunities

To view a selective listing of solicitations posted by this office please visit the DSO Opportunities page, where you can further sort by topic.

Programs

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Intense and Compact Neutron Sources (ICONS)

Dr. Mark Wrobel
The Intense and Compact Neutron Sources (ICONS) program seeks to achieve highly portable, intense neutron sources to enable deployable, high-resolution neutron and x-ray imaging for DoD applications such as non-destructive evaluation, detection of explosives and special nuclear materials, and forensics. More
| CBRN | Sensors |

Lagrange

Major C. David Lewis, USAF
The Lagrange program seeks to develop new mathematical approaches to optimization problems in uncertain, dynamic, multiscale, and high-dimensional settings. By bridging methodologies developed for both discrete and continuous optimizations, Lagrange aims to enable solutions for complex, realistic problems that involve dynamic environments, rapidly changing requirements, and increasing or decreasing amounts of information. More
| Complexity | Math |

Make-It

Dr. Anne Fischer
Synthetic chemistry is important across countless technological areas, from medicines to energetics to advanced coatings to functional materials. While our synthetic capabilities have developed rapidly over the last century, current approaches are still slow and inefficient, with poor reproducibility and scalability and limited use of prior knowledge. Such an approach not only limits production of known materials, but also impedes discovery of better synthetic routes and completely new molecules. More
| Chemistry | Complexity | Data | Fundamentals | Integration |

Materials Architectures and Characterization for Hypersonics (MACH)

Dr. William Carter
The Materials Architectures and Characterization for Hypersonics (MACH) program aims to develop and demonstrate new materials architectures for sharp, shape-stable, cooled leading edges for hypersonic vehicles. The program will investigate innovative approaches that enable revolutionary advances in the materials, design and implementation of shape-stable, high heat flux capable leading edge systems. More
| Air | Manufacturing | Materials | Microsystems | Thermal |

Materials Development for Platforms (MDP)

Dr. Jan Vandenbrande
Military platforms—such as ships, aircraft and ground vehicles—rely on advanced materials to make them lighter, stronger and more resistant to stress, heat and other harsh environmental conditions. Currently, the process for developing new materials to field in platforms frequently takes more than a decade. This lengthy process often means that developers of new military platforms are forced to rely on decades-old, mature materials because potentially more advanced materials are still being developed and tested, and are considered too large a risk to be implemented into platform designs. More
| Complexity | Manufacturing | Materials |