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In this episode of the Voices from DARPA podcast, Dr. John Burke, a program manager since 2017 in the agency’s Microsystems Technology Office (MTO), goes deep, quantum-mechanics deep. The miniaturized, affordable, and ultrastable atomic clocks he hopes to make possible would kick in if the GPS system were to go down due to natural or adversarial actions. Such clocks could keep the military machine viable while also preserving or even enhancing the operation of civilian must-haves ranging from financial transactions to ridesharing (think Uber and Lyft). Burke has teams of researchers pursuing magnificently sensitive magnetometers for detecting objects, materials, and activities otherwise hidden underground, underwater, or behind bone.

In this episode of the Voices from DARPA podcast, Dr. Michael Fiddy, a program manager since 2016 in the agency’s Defense Sciences Office (DSO), takes listeners on a whirlwind tour of his programs.

Optical frequency synthesizers – systems that output laser beams at precise and stable frequencies – have proven extremely valuable in a variety of scientific endeavors, including space exploration, gas sensing, control of quantum systems, and high-precision light detection and ranging (LIDAR). While they provide unprecedented performance, the use of optical frequency synthesizers has largely been limited to laboratory settings due to the cost, size, and power requirements of their components. To reduce these obstacles to widespread use, DARPA launched the Direct On-Chip Digital Optical Synthesizer (DODOS) program in 2014. Key to the program is the miniaturization of necessary components and their integration into a compact module, enabling broader deployment of the technology while unlocking new applications.

From August 18-20, DARPA will host its third Electronics Resurgence Initiative (ERI) Summit and Microsystems Technology Office (MTO) Symposium. The annual event brings together leaders from across the electronics ecosystem – spanning government, defense, academia, and industry – to foster collaboration and share technical progress on DARPA’s five-year, $1.5 billion dollar investment into the advancement of the U.S. semiconductor industry.

Antibiotic resistance is on the rise and is recognized by both the CDC¹ and the U.S. Military² as a current – and formidable – global health threat. The U.S Department of Defense (DoD) has long documented the warfighter’s outsized risk of exposure to infectious disease, including the increasing number of multi-drug resistant (MDR) organisms that have challenged military wound care in Iraq and Afghanistan³. Despite this looming crisis, there has been a notable exodus of pharmaceutical companies from the antibiotic space, as well as several high-profile failures of biotechnology companies focused on antibiotic development⁴.

In this episode of the Voices from DARPA podcast, Dr. Timothy Chung, a program manager since 2016 in the agency’s Tactical Technology Office, delves into his robotics and autonomous technology programs – the Subterranean (SubT) Challenge and OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET). From robot soccer to live-fly experimentation programs involving dozens of unmanned aircraft systems (UASs), he explains how he aims to assist humans heading into unknown environments via advances in collaborative autonomy and robotics.

Establishing long-range tactical communications for U.S. troops in remote locations currently requires giant parabolic dishes, tall pole-mounted antennas, large antenna domes, and high-power amplifiers. Besides their significant weight, power, and cost (SWAP-C), these antennas present large visual and radio frequency (RF) signatures, are vulnerable to jamming, and constitute a single point of failure.

Electronic systems – from the processors powering smartphones to the embedded devices keeping the Internet of Things humming – have become a critical part of daily life. The security of these systems is of paramount importance to the Department of Defense (DoD), commercial industry, and beyond. To help protect these systems from common means of exploitation, DARPA launched the System Security Integration Through Hardware and Firmware (SSITH) program in 2017.

Two California companies were selected for DARPA’s Gamma Ray Inspection Technology (GRIT) program and have begun work to develop a transportable, tunable source of gamma rays for a host of national security, industrial, and medical applications.

As Internet of Things (IoT) devices rapidly increase in popularity and deployment, economic attackers and nation-states alike are shifting their attention to the vulnerabilities of digital integrated circuit (IC) chips. Threats to IC chips are well known, and despite various measures designed to mitigate them, hardware developers have largely been slow to implement security solutions due to limited expertise, high cost and complexity, and lack of security-oriented design tools integrated with supporting semiconductor intellectual property (IP).

In this episode of the Voices from DARPA podcast, Mark Wrobel, a program manager since 2019 in the agency’s Defense Sciences Office (DSO), chronicles progress in the SIGMA+ program and its potential near-term relevance to monitoring the environment for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

In this episode of our Voices from DARPA podcast, Eric Van Gieson, a program manager since 2017 in the agency’s Biological Technologies Office (BTO), recounts how a boyhood fascination with DARPA ultimately led to his current role overseeing a portfolio of envelope-pushing programs. These include a program that seeks new diagnostic tools for perhaps the earliest-possible detection of exposure to pathogens, including SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19; an effort to identify and leverage the biomolecular bases underlying optimal performance in such roles as piloting aircraft or participating in special forces missions; research toward new personal-protection technologies that combine advanced featherweight fabrics with designed, bio-based agents applied directly to the body where they can neutralize injurious chemical and biological agents before they can do damage; and a bold biomedical strategy that stands a chance of replacing some medicine-based treatments (for conditions ranging from irritable bowel syndrome to post-traumatic stress disorder) with treatments based on the electrical stimulation of the peripheral nervous system, specifically the far-reaching vagus nerve.

DARPA recently selected nine teams for the Gamebreaker Artificial Intelligence (AI) Exploration program, which held its virtual kickoff meeting May 5.

In partnership with the U.S. Space Force and Space Development Agency, DARPA’s Blackjack program is targeting flights to low-Earth orbit (LEO) later this year and 2021. Using a series of small risk reduction satellites, the program aims to demonstrate advanced technology for satellite constellation autonomy and space mesh networks. Blackjack seeks to develop and validate critical elements of global high-speed autonomous networks in LEO, proving a capability that could provide the Department of Defense with highly connected, resilient, and persistent overhead coverage.

DARPA has selected seven university and industry teams for the first phase of the Optimization with Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum devices (ONISQ) program. Phase 1 of the program began in March and will last 18 months.

From navigation to remote banking, mobile device users rely on a variety of applications to streamline daily tasks, communicate, and dramatically increase productivity. While exceedingly useful, the ecosystem of third-party applications utilizes a number of sensors – microphones, GPS, pedometers, cameras – and user interactions to collect data used to enable functionality. Troves of sensitive personal data about users are accessible to these applications and as defense and commercial mobile device users become increasingly reliant on the technology, there are growing concerns around the challenge this creates for preserving user privacy.

The Defense Sciences Office (DSO) – one of six technical offices at DARPA – is sponsoring Discover DSO Day (D3) via webinar June 24-25, 2020, to inform potential proposers about the scientific and technical research areas of interest to DSO.

DARPA’s AlphaDogfight Trials Final event, originally scheduled for April, has been rescheduled for the summer due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The third and final trial is now planned for Aug. 17-20, 2020, at AFWERX, the Air Force’s innovation hub, in Las Vegas, Nevada.

DARPA has awarded contracts to nine performers to begin work on the fifth swarm sprint for the agency’s OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program. The program envisions swarms of up to 250 collaborative autonomous systems providing insights to ground troops as they operate in dense urban environments.

The airspace above future battlefields is expected to be increasingly congested with large numbers of unmanned aerial systems, manned aircraft, munitions and missiles filling the skies. To de-conflict airspace activities of friendly forces and rapidly counter an enemy’s actions on the battlefield requires new technologies to effectively integrate effects from all domains.

Warfighters are travelers and thus suffer from travelers’ ailments including disrupted sleep cycles and limited access to safe food and water. Warfighters who have not slept well have lower alertness, weaker athletic performance, and greater disorientation. Current approaches to restoring wakefulness often lean on chemical methods that disrupt downstream sleep patterns and lead to exhaustion.

The United States confronts a potential national security threat each time a new outbreak of infectious disease occurs anywhere in the world. Our military must be able to deploy safely to wherever they are required to operate. The disease threats seen abroad can also impact the civilian population. The nationwide spread of H1N1 flu in 2009, of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome in Indiana in 2013, and the presence of Ebola in Texas in 2014 are recent reminders of this reality. As the current COVID-19 pandemic shows, an unwarned highly contagious virus can rapidly overwhelm medical systems worldwide.

DARPA has selected three performers to develop technologies and solutions for the Underminer program that would surpass current commercial drilling capabilities. Underminer aims to demonstrate the feasibility of rapidly constructing tactical tunnel networks to provide secure logistics infrastructure to pre-position supplies or resupply troops as they move through an area.

We find ourselves in pandemic times. The global population is under siege by an infectious virus new to humankind. It’s called Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2, or SARS-CoV-2. It’s the causative agent of the pandemic disease designated COVID-19. This viral adversary knows no politics. It recognizes no national boundaries. It is unconcerned with anyone’s identity. All 7.8 billion of us are the same to the virus: we are all hosts suitable to commandeer to make copies of itself.

The space domain is critical to national security. It also has become increasingly chaotic and crowded over the past decade as the burgeoning space industry launches constellations of satellites. To conduct their missions, military commanders need timely and accurate information from space assets, as well as robust and reliable communications.

Under DARPA’s Photonics in the Package for Extreme Scalability (PIPES) program, researchers from Intel and Ayar Labs have demonstrated early progress towards improving chip connectivity with photons – or light. Signaling over optical fibers enables the internet today and optical transceivers are ubiquitous in data centers, yet digital systems still rely upon the movement of electrons over metal wires to push data between integrated circuits (ICs) on a board. Increasingly, the limitations of electrical signaling from the chip package restrict overall bandwidth and signaling efficiency, throttling the performance of advanced systems.

Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) about COVID-19 (Coronavirus) for DARPA Performers

Service members at U.S. Indo-Pacific Command headquarters in Hawaii recently tested a prototype DARPA system designed to help military analysts and planners determine if observed events – such as increased force movements, cyber intrusions, and civil unrest – are unconnected occurrences, or if they’re part of an adversary’s coordinated campaign to achieve strategic objectives in a geographic region.

Advances in digital microelectronics have enabled indispensable capabilities for the Department of Defense (DoD) in the fields of information processing, sensors, and communications. Increasingly, system performance in these domains is constrained not by the limits of computation at individual chips, but rather by the electrical data movement between them. The energy efficiency and data bandwidth of electrical interconnects between integrated circuits (ICs) has failed to keep pace with improvements in transistor technology. To address this challenge, DARPA developed the Photonics in the Package for Extreme Scalability (PIPES) program, which aims to expand the use of optical signaling for data transfer and place high-bandwidth photonics within the package of application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs).

DARPA’s Manta Ray Program aims to demonstrate critical technologies for a new class of long duration, long range, payload-capable unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs). UUVs that operate for extended durations without the need for on-site human logistics support or maintenance offer the potential for persistent operations during longer term deployments.

DARPA has established a new partnership with U.S. industry to jointly develop and deploy advanced robotic capabilities in space. The agency has signed an Other Transactions for Prototypes agreement with Space Logistics, LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Northrop Grumman Corporation, as its commercial partner for the Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites (RSGS) program.

Less than two years from its start, DARPA’s effort to stress the approaches and processes associated with space launch ended March 2 with the lone Launch Challenge participant – Astra – scrubbing its launch with less than a minute left in the countdown before liftoff. Astra faced technical and weather-related issues during the roughly two-week window of the Challenge campaign, which ran February 17-March 2 in Kodiak, Alaska.

Phase 3 of DARPA’s Operational Fires (OpFires) program began in earnest this month with government and contractor staff finalizing the system architecture approach, including a plan to use existing components from ground-launched missile systems, along with new booster technologies designed to support future hypersonic weapons. Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control is leading the integration effort for the third phase of the program, which will focus on first stage booster design and maturation, launcher development, and vehicle integration.

The safety and security of critical information – whether it is sensitive intellectual property (IP), financial information, personally identifiable information (PII), intelligence insight, or beyond – is of vital importance. Conventional data encryption methods or cryptographic solutions, such as Advanced Encryption Standards (AES), translate data into a secret “code” that can only be decoded by people with access to a decryption key.

Autonomous and semi-autonomous systems need active illumination to navigate at night or underground. Switching on visible headlights or some other emitting system like lidar, however, has a significant drawback: It allows adversaries to detect a vehicle’s presence, in some cases from long distances away.

The ability to traverse vertical spaces proved key to success in the Subterranean (SubT) Challenge Urban Circuit. CoSTAR took the top spot in the Systems competition, while BARCS topped the leaderboard in the Virtual competition. Extending their performance from the Tunnel Circuit, CTU-CRAS-NORLAB earned the highest score among self-funded teams and the $500,000 prize. Also repeating success from the Tunnel Circuit, Coordinated Robotics earned the self-funded first prize in the Virtual competition, taking home $250,000.

Sensors are usually thought of in terms of physical devices that receive and respond to electromagnetic signals – from everyday sensors in our smartphones and connected home appliances to more advanced sensors in buildings, cars, airplanes and spacecraft. No physical sensor or aggregation of electronic sensors, however, can continuously and globally detect disturbances that take place on or above the earth’s surface.

DARPA is seeking state-of-the-art virtual models, simulation meshes, and robot controllers for vehicles, sensors, and/or environments for informational and planning purposes in support of the agency’s Subterranean (SubT) Challenge. The SubT Challenge is interested in how innovative technologies can disrupt and positively impact how the subterranean domain is leveraged without significant cost or risk to human lives.

Emerging 5G mobile wireless networking technologies are slated to dramatically increase in both scale and speed, enabling much faster access to data collected from billions of connected devices. This supercharged information highway is envisioned to play an important role across several industries, ranging from medicine to manufacturing. Major advances in 5G, including new core network features will make it easier to customize the network at a wide variety of locations.

Today’s defense electronics systems rely on radio frequency (RF) mixed-mode electronics – those that integrate RF, analog, and digital circuits onto a single chip – to interface RF signals with digital processors. This technology supports critical communications, radar, and electronic warfare (EW) capabilities, as well as being widely used to support commercial telecommunications. The Department of Defense (DoD) has capability demands that far exceed the requirements of the commercial world in terms of speed, fidelity, capacity, and precision.

U.S. forces operating in remote, under-governed regions around the world often find that an area’s distinct cultural and societal practices are opaque to outsiders, but are obvious to locals. Commanders can be hindered from making optimal decisions because they lack knowledge of how local socio-economic, political, religious, health, and infrastructure factors interact to shape a specific community.

The sophistication of autonomous systems currently being developed across various domains and industries has markedly increased in recent years, due in large part to advances in computing, modeling, sensing, and other technologies. While much of the technology that has enabled this technical revolution has moved forward expeditiously, formal safety assurances for these systems still lag behind.

In its third field experiment, DARPA’s OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program deployed swarms of autonomous air and ground vehicles to demonstrate a raid in an urban area. The OFFSET program envisions swarms of up to 250 collaborative autonomous systems providing critical insights to small ground units in urban areas where limited sight lines and tight spaces can obscure hazards, as well as constrain mobility and communications.

Today’s electromagnetic (EM) spectrum is a scarce resource that is becoming increasingly congested and contested as friendly, unfriendly, and neutral entities vie for available spectrum resources at any given time, location, and frequency. Within the Department of Defense (DoD), radio frequency (RF) systems, such as communications networks and radar, must operate within this congested environment and contend with mission-compromising interference from both self- and externally generated signals. A desire to support wideband EM spectrum operations also adds to the burden, as current approaches to mitigating wideband receiver interference are sub-optimal and force compromises around signal sensitivity, bandwidth usage, and system performance.

DARPA's Gremlins program has completed the first flight test of its X-61A vehicle. The test in late November at the U.S. Army’s Dugway Proving Ground in Utah included one captive-carry mission aboard a C-130A and an airborne launch and free flight lasting just over an hour-and-a-half.

The joint DARPA/U.S. Army Operational Fires (OpFires) program is moving into Phase 3 to further develop and integrate ongoing propulsion system designs into a missile system, including the launcher, electronics, and payload. OpFires aims to develop and demonstrate a novel ground-launched system, enabling hypersonic boost glide weapons to penetrate modern enemy air defenses and rapidly and precisely engage critical time-sensitive targets from a highly mobile launch platform.

Seventeen teams have qualified to participate in the DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge Urban Circuit. Eleven teams will compete in the Systems competition at Satsop Business Park in Elma, Washington, Feb. 18-27, 2020. Eight teams qualified to participate in the Virtual competition, which will run Jan. 23-30. Two teams will compete in both Virtual and Systems events.

Providing potable drinking water to deployed troops operating in low resource or contested environments is no simple undertaking. Logistics teams face great risk delivering water and often incur what would otherwise be preventable casualties. DARPA’s new Atmospheric Water Extraction (AWE) program sets out to sharply reduce that risk by giving deployed units the technology to capture potable water on the spot from the air in quantities sufficient to meet daily needs of the warfighter, even in extremely dry areas of the world.