News

DARPA has completed a major review milestone for its Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites, or RSGS, program. Results from a recently completed preliminary design review showed that the robotic payload design – coupled with a spacecraft bus that Space Systems Loral (SSL) is providing through a partnership agreement – is on track to fulfill a multi-year mission to service at least 20 commercial and government spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit (GEO).

Today, the expeditious delivery of electronic documents, messages, and other data is relied on for everything from communications to navigation. As the near instantaneous exchange of information has increased in volume, so has the variety of electronic data formats–from images and videos to text and maps. Verifying the trustworthiness and provenance of this mountain of electronic information is an exceedingly difficult task as individuals and organizations routinely engage with data shared by unauthenticated and potentially compromised sources.

The general-purpose computer has remained the dominant computing architecture for the last 50 years, driven largely by the relentless pace of Moore’s Law—the transistor-scaling that has allowed for a half-century of rapid progress in electronics. As this trajectory shows signs of slowing, however, it has become increasingly more challenging to achieve performance gains from generalized hardware, setting the stage for a resurgence in specialized architectures.

A once highly manual process, circuit design has been transformed by the advent of electronic design automation (EDA) tools and modular design methodologies. Despite continuing advances in automation technologies, the demand for increasingly complex System-on-Chip (SoC) platforms has shown no sign of slowing. Today’s SoCs incorporate billions of transistors with miles of electrical wiring that are integrated within a tiny chip.

The use of intellectual-property (IP) blocks–discrete, modular, reusable blocks that deliver frequently used circuit functions—has significantly streamlined the design and creation of microchips. Just as the number of transistors per chip has grown dramatically in line with Moore’s Law—the transistor scaling that has allowed for 50 years of electronics advancement–so too has the number of IP blocks on those same chips.

DARPA will host a competitors day September 27, 2018, to communicate the vision and timeline of the DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge, engage potential competitors, and provide a space for technical and operational exchange.

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.

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.

Imagine a natural disaster scenario, such as an earthquake, that inflicts widespread damage to buildings and structures, critical utilities and infrastructure, and threatens human safety. Having the ability to navigate the rubble and enter highly unstable areas could prove invaluable to saving lives or detecting additional hazards among the wreckage. Partnering rescue personnel with robots to evaluate high-risk scenarios and environments can help increase the likelihood of successful search and recovery efforts, or other critical tasks while minimizing the threat to human teams.

Models for providing hourly terrestrial weather forecasts anywhere in the world have become increasingly precise—our smartphones buzz or chirp with local alerts of approaching thunderstorms, heavy snow, flash floods, and big events like tornados and hurricanes. The military relies on accurate weather forecasts for planning complex operations in the air, on ground, and at sea.

To maximize use of launch vehicle performance during its 2019 Launch Challenge, DARPA has released a request for information (RFI) seeking payload ideas from the space community. It is anticipated that Launch Challenge competitors will have a wide range of low Earth orbit (LEO) mass delivery capabilities, from roughly 10 to 500 kilograms.

Machine learning (ML) systems today learn by example, ingesting tons of data that has been individually labeled by human analysts to generate a desired output. As these systems have progressed, deep neural networks (DNN) have emerged as the state of the art in ML models. DNN are capable of powering tasks like machine translation and speech or object recognition with a much higher degree of accuracy. However, training DNN requires massive amounts of labeled data–typically 10⁹ or 10¹⁰ training examples. The process of amassing and labeling this mountain of information is costly and time consuming.

DARPA’s Experimental Spaceplane (XSP) advances toward its goal for rapid turnaround and on-demand launch with the completion of a test series that put the spaceplane’s AR-22 Experimental Spaceplane Main Engine through a rigorous campaign. In the two weeks preceding the campaign, the engine ran twice to establish initial performance characteristics and turnaround processes. Then, starting July 26, the engineering team successfully fired the engine 10 times in just under 240 hours. All firings lasted at least 100 seconds. The AR-22 engine is a variant of the RS-25, also known as the Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME).

First announced in June 2017, DARPA’s Electronics Resurgence Initiative (ERI) is a multi-year, upwards of $1.5 billion investment in jumpstarting innovation and collaboration across the U.S. electronics community to address an array of long foreseen challenges to Moore’s Law. To kickoff this community-wide effort, DARPA is hosting its first annual ERI Summit from July 23-25 in San Francisco, CA. The three-day event will bring together leading voices from across the electronics community–including Alphabet, Applied Materials, Intel, Synopsys, Cadence, Mentor Graphics, NVIDIA, and IBM–to address challenges and opportunities for the next half century of electronics progress.

DARPA’s Ground X-Vehicle Technologies (GXV-T) program aims to improve mobility, survivability, safety, and effectiveness of future combat vehicles without piling on armor. Several Phase 2 contract awardees recently demonstrated advances on a variety of potentially groundbreaking technologies to meet the program’s goals.

Chemical innovation plays a key role in developing cutting-edge technologies for the military. Research chemists design and synthesize new molecules that could enable a slew of next-generation military products, such as novel propellants for spacecraft engines; new pharmaceuticals and medicines for troops in the field; lighter and longer-lasting batteries and fuel cells; advanced adhesives, coatings and paints; and less expensive explosives that are safer to handle. The problem, however, is that existing molecule design and production methods rely primarily on experts’ intuition in a laborious, trial-and-error research process.

Protection against many common pathogens and environmental stressors is written into our DNA. Our skin responds to sun exposure. Our immune system mounts defenses when we get the flu. Our bodies inherently work to mitigate the potential for harm caused by these health threats. However, these intrinsic responses are not always quick, robust, or appropriate enough to adequately defend us from harm, which is why many people experience sunburn after intense sun exposure or suffer severe symptoms, even death, following exposure to the flu.

DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office is hosting a Virtual Proposers Day June 6 and 7 to provide information through pre-recorded videos about TTO’s goals and areas for investment in advance of a mid-June release of the 2018 Disruptive Capabilities for Future Warfare Broad Agency Announcement (BAA). The event also will provide an opportunity for companies and individuals to meet with TTO program managers to discuss concepts for advanced research, development, and demonstration of systems for military missions. Registration closes June 1 at noon EDT.

DARPA is progressing toward its plan to demonstrate airborne launch and recovery of multiple unmanned aerial systems (UASs), targeted for late 2019. Now in its third and final phase, the goal for the Gremlins program is to develop a full-scale technology demonstration featuring the air recovery of multiple low-cost, reusable UASs, or “gremlins.”

Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) systems have significantly advanced in recent years. However, they are currently limited to executing only those tasks they are specifically designed to perform and are unable to adapt when encountering situations outside their programming or training. DARPA’s Lifelong Learning Machines (L2M) program, drawing inspiration from biological systems, seeks to develop fundamentally new ML approaches that allow systems to adapt continually to new circumstances without forgetting previous learning.

Only a few decades ago, finding a particular channel on the radio or television meant dialing a knob by hand, making small tweaks and adjustments to hone in on the right signal. Of course, we now take such fine tuning for granted, simply pressing a button to achieve the same effect. This convenience is enabled by radio frequency synthesis, the generation of accurate signal frequencies from a single reference oscillator.

Today, DARPA announced the DARPA Launch Challenge, designed to promote rapid access to space within days, not years. Our nation’s space architecture is currently built around a limited number of exquisite systems with development times of up to 10 years. With the launch challenge, DARPA plans to accelerate capabilities and further incentivize industry to deliver launch solutions that are both flexible and responsive.

Today, Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS), Government off-the-shelf (GOTS), and Free and open-source (FOSS) software support nearly all aspects of DoD, military, and commercial operations. Securing this diverse technology base requires highly skilled hackers who reason about the functionality of software and identify novel vulnerabilities, using a suite of tools and techniques that require extensive training. While effective, the process is largely manual and requires hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of effort for each vulnerability discovered.

On February 7, 1958, four months after the Soviet Union boosted the intensity of the Cold War by launching humanity’s first satellite, then Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy established the Advanced Research Projects Agency with this mandate: “to provide within the Department of Defense an agency for the direction and performance of certain advanced research and development projects.” In carrying out that open-ended mission for the past 60 years, the Agency has become widely known as a driver of technological developments that have girded national security (stealth, precision munitions, and unmanned aerial vehicles) and that sometimes have transformed daily civilian life (the internet, miniaturized GPS, and emerging fleets of driverless vehicles).

The microelectronics community is facing an array of long foreseen obstacles to Moore’s Law, the transistor scaling that has allowed for 50 years of rapid progress in electronics. Current economic, geopolitical, and physics-based complications make the future of the electronics industry uniquely interesting at this moment. To jump-start innovation in the field, DARPA announced in June 2017 that it would coalesce a broad series of programs into the Electronics Resurgence Initiative (ERI).

DARPA’s OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program envisions future small-unit infantry forces using small unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) and/or small unmanned ground systems (UGSs) in swarms of 250 robots or more to accomplish diverse missions in complex urban environments. By leveraging and combining emerging technologies in swarm autonomy and human-swarm teaming, the program seeks to enable rapid development and deployment of breakthrough swarm capabilities.

DARPA launched the Restoring Active Memory (RAM) program in November 2013 with the goal of developing a fully implantable, closed-loop neural interface capable of restoring normal memory function to military personnel suffering from the effects of brain injury or illness. Just over four years later, the program is returning remarkable results.

Over the past two decades, the international biomedical research community has demonstrated increasingly sophisticated ways to allow a person's brain to communicate with a device, allowing breakthroughs aimed at improving quality of life, such as access to computers and the internet, and more recently control of a prosthetic limb. DARPA has been at the forefront of this research.

An emergent type of conflict in recent years has been coined “gray zone,” because it sits in a nebulous area between peace and conventional warfare. Gray-zone action is not openly declared or defined, it’s slower, and is prosecuted more subtly—using social, psychological, religious, information, cyber and other means to achieve physical or cognitive objectives with or without violence. The lack of clarity of intent—the grayness—makes it challenging to detect, characterize, and counter an enemy fighting this way.

When a Service member suffers a traumatic injury or acute infection, the time from event to first medical treatment is usually the single most significant factor in determining the outcome between saving a life or not. First responders must act as quickly as possible, first to ensure a patient’s sheer survival and then to prevent permanent disability. The Department of Defense refers to this critical, initial window of time as the “golden hour,” but in many cases the opportunity to successfully intervene may extend much less than sixty minutes, which is why the military invests so heavily in moving casualties as rapidly as possible from the battlefield to suitable medical facilities.

The increasing threat of infectious diseases is intensifying the need for breakthrough technologies and capabilities to protect first responders and equip them with therapeutics that can halt the impact of infectious agents. Current approaches for recent public health emergencies due to infectious diseases have not produced effective preventive or therapeutic solutions in a relevant timescale. Examples from recent outbreaks such as H3N2 (flu), Ebola, and Zika viruses highlight the significant lag in deployment and efficacy of life-saving solutions.

Advanced commercially available technologies—such as additive manufacturing (3-D printing), small-scale chemical reactors for pharmaceuticals, and CRISPR gene-manipulation tools—have opened wide access to scientific exploration and discovery. In the hands of terrorists and rogue nation states, however, these capabilities could be misused to concoct chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and high-yield explosive (CBRNE) weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in small quantities and in form factors that are hard to detect.

Bacteria underpins much of our world, acting behind the scenes to affect the health and behavior of animals and plants. They help produce food, provide oxygen, and even reshape the environment through a vast array of biological processes. They come in a phenomenal number of strains—many still unknown—and thrive in different ecological and environmental niches all over the world. But while their diverse behaviors makes them essential to life, bacteria can also be deadly.

The world’s vast oceans and seas offer seemingly endless spaces in which adversaries of the United States can maneuver undetected. The U.S. military deploys networks of manned and unmanned platforms and sensors to monitor adversary activity, but the scale of the task is daunting and hardware alone cannot meet every need in the dynamic marine environment. Sea life, however, offers a potential new advantage. Marine organisms are highly attuned to their surroundings—their survival depends on it—and a new program out of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office aims to tap into their natural sensing capabilities to detect and signal when activities of interest occur in strategic waters such as straits and littoral regions.

Picture an intelligence officer in the field. She is trying to piece together a suspected threat, and has access to someone who may have a role in carrying it out. There may be traces of biological or chemical agents on his clothing or hair. She can look for them, but they’re transient, and often present in such low concentrations that she’ll need to send samples to a laboratory. Or she can check his epigenetic markers, read a history of any time he’s been exposed to threat agents, and start piecing together a chain of evidence right there in the field, in real time.

DARPA today announced its plans for the 2019 finale of the Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2)—the world’s first collaborative machine-intelligence competition to address spectrum scarcity. Through a new partnership with the GSMA, the organization that represents mobile operators worldwide, DARPA will host a live SC2 Championship event alongside the 2019 Mobile World Congress Americas (MWCA) annual conference and exhibition. The DARPA and GSMA partnership creates an opportunity to display the groundbreaking SC2 technologies for the wireless telecommunications community at an accessible, public event.

DARPA has successfully completed its Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV) program and has officially transferred the technology demonstration vessel, christened Sea Hunter, to the Office of Naval Research (ONR). ONR will continue developing the revolutionary prototype vehicle—the first of what could ultimately become an entirely new class of ocean-going vessel able to traverse thousands of kilometers over open seas for months at a time, without a single crew member aboard—as the Medium Displacement Unmanned Surface Vehicle (MDUSV).

There is increasing interest in making broader use of the millimeter wave frequency band for communications on small mobile platforms where narrow antenna beams from small radiating apertures provide enhanced communication security. Today’s millimeter wave systems, however, are not user friendly and are designed to be platform specific, lacking interoperability and are thus reserved for only the most complex platforms. To expand the use of millimeter wave phased-arrays and make them broadly applicable across DoD systems, many technical challenges must be addressed, including wideband frequency coverage, precision beam pointing, user discover and mesh networking.

Whether it is excited electrons emitting photons in a lightbulb or the vibrational frequency of atoms in an atomic clock, quantum phenomena are simultaneously fundamental aspects of nature and the basis of current state-of-the-art and future technologies. This is particularly the case as sensor and device performance continue to improve and approach their fundamental limits. It is not lost on DARPA that controlling quantum phenomena is an increasingly important challenge in the realm of national defense.

DARPA is all about developing advanced technologies that could underpin decisive national security capabilities in the years to come. A typical sequence that leads to new technology starts with fundamental science and engineering research, which, in turn, opens new pathways toward greatly improved technology by way of applied and goal-directed engineering and product development. In a bid to power up the front end of this sequence in the vast and complex area of microelectronics, DARPA, and a consortium of industry partners in the Joint University Microelectronics Program (JUMP), have completed the search for U.S. university collaborators to undertake high-risk, high-payoff research that addresses existing and emerging challenges in microelectronic technologies.

The rise of network-connected systems that are becoming embedded seemingly everywhere–from industrial control systems to aircraft avionics–is opening up a host of rich technical capabilities in deployed systems. Even so, as the collective technology project underlying this massive deployment of connectivity unfolds, more consumer, industrial, and military players are turning to inexpensive, commodity off-the-shelf (COTS) devices with general-purpose designs applicable for a range of functionalities and deployment options. While less costly and more flexible, commodity components are inherently less secure than the single-purpose, custom devices they are replacing.

The growing complexity of space operations coupled with an increased need for timely decisions demands innovative approaches to battle management command and control (BMC2) technologies. To help ensure future U.S. technological and strategic superiority, DARPA’s Hallmark program seeks to develop revolutionary tools and technologies to plan, assess, and execute U.S. military operations in space. The program has completed initial research and awarded Phase 1 contracts to 11 organizations, which both augment existing commercial technologies and pursue entirely new capabilities. Hallmark has released a Broad Agency Announcement seeking additional technologies for potential inclusion.

DARPA’s Collaborative Operations in Denied Environment (CODE) program aims to extend the capability of the U.S. military’s existing unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) to conduct dynamic, long-distance engagements of highly mobile ground and maritime targets in contested or denied battlespaces. Multiple CODE-equipped unmanned aircraft would navigate to their destinations and find, track, identify, and engage targets under established rules of engagement—all under the supervision of a single human mission commander.

The director of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Dr. Steven Walker, today announced the appointment of Dr. Peter Highnam as deputy director of the Agency. Highnam, a former DARPA program manager, is expected to help advance critical research in several fields including artificial intelligence, data analytics, communications, reconnaissance, electronic warfare, biosecurity, and warfighter health.

Avian influenza (H7N9). MERS coronavirus. Ebola. Hepatitis E. Yellow Fever. Lassa. Zika. When you consider the viral infectious diseases that emerged and reemerged around the world in 2017 alone, what many of them have in common is that they originated in animals and spilled over into humans after a series of mutations that enable the pathogens to jump species.

DARPA’s pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies and capabilities for national security take place in about 250 possibility-redefining programs across dozens of fields, from quantum metamaterials and machine learning to neurotechnology and unmanned system autonomy. Throughout the year, the Agency produces updates about newly launched efforts, promising results, and major program accomplishments. We post them all on the DARPA news page, which in 2017 received 35 million page views—a 30 percent increase over last year.

The DARPA YouTube channel is home to hundreds of videos showing the depth and breadth of DARPA’s research and the amazing people behind it. All told in 2017, our videos were watched more than two million times, and viewers cumulatively spent almost eight years looking at our footage.

DARPA’s Twitter and Facebook feeds are two of the primary ways the Agency shares its diverse research with the world, and engages communities interested in our pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies and capabilities for national security. Our posts on Facebook and Twitter reached nearly 20 million people in 2017. Progress in the fields of autonomy, artificial intelligence, and neuroelectronics—along with anniversaries of past DARPA accomplishments in the development of robotics and communications—were among the most popular topics.