News

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.

DARPA’s Measuring Biological Aptitude (MBA) program begins and ends with the men and women of the United States military. The program — first announced in January 2019 — centers on how service members can access the potential of their own biological systems to achieve peak results across a range of military specializations, and aims for a detailed understanding of how measurement of those systems in real time can help service members perform at their maximum potential.

Lasers are essential to many fields – ranging from optical communications and remote sensing, to manufacturing and medicine. While the semiconductor laser was first demonstrated nearly 60 years ago, advances in diode lasers and access to semiconductor fabrication techniques have enabled continued innovation and miniaturization of the technology. Photonic integrated circuits (PICs), which combine many photonic elements onto a single chip, have also transformed the way lasers and other optical systems are engineered, creating improvements in size, weight, and power (SWaP), system performance, and enabling new functionality. Despite these advances, a number of obstacles still hamper the proliferation of optical systems for defense and commercial applications.

In a twist on how gene editing technology might be applied in the future, DARPA’s newest biotechnology funding opportunity aims to incorporate gene editors into detectors for distributed health biosurveillance and rapid, point-of-need diagnostics for endemic, emerging, and engineered pathogenic threats. The “Detect It with Gene Editing Technologies” (DIGET) program could help the Department of Defense maintain force readiness by informing rapid medical response and increasing the standard of care for troops, and preserve geopolitical stability by preventing the spread of infectious disease from becoming a driver of conflict.

DARPA has awarded six contracts for work on the Angler program, which aims to pioneer the next generation of autonomous underwater robotic systems capable of physical intervention in the deep ocean environment. This class of future unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) must overcome reliance on GPS and human intervention to support infrastructure establishment, maintenance, and resilience over the vastness of the ocean. The Angler program seeks to merge breakthroughs in terrestrial and space robotics, as well as underwater sensing, to develop autonomous robotic solutions capable of navigating and surveying ocean depths, and physically manipulating human-made objects of interest.

The DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge Urban Circuit will take place Feb. 18-27, 2020, at Satsop Business Park west of Olympia, Washington. In the SubT Challenge, teams deploy autonomous ground and aerial systems to attempt to map, identify, and report artifacts along two competition courses. The artifacts represent items a first responder or service member may encounter in underground environments.

With 50 total points, Coordinated Robotics finished in first place in the DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge Virtual Tunnel Circuit event, and as the top self-funded team, earned $250,000. Eight teams developed, tested, and submitted their software-based solutions for simulation-based evaluation on the SubT Virtual Testbed.

DARPA today announced that GatorWings, a team of undergraduate students, Ph.D. candidates, and professors from the University of Florida are the winners of the Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2) – a three-year competition to unlock the true potential of the radio frequency (RF) spectrum with artificial intelligence (AI). DARPA hosted the championship event at Mobile World Congress 2019 (MWC19) Los Angeles in front of a live audience. SC2’s final 10 competitors and their AI-enabled radios went head-to-head during six rounds of competitive play. GatorWings emerged victorious, taking home first place and the $2 million grand prize.

In early 2020, one team will attempt to win a $10 million prize in the DARPA Launch Challenge. The Challenge aims to increase the flexibility and pace of space launch to put assets into low Earth orbit to meet national security priorities.

DARPA has selected eight teams to compete in the AlphaDogfight Trials, a virtual competition designed to demonstrate advanced artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that can perform simulated within-visual-range air combat maneuvering, colloquially known as a dogfight.

Spinal cord injury disrupts the connection between brain and body, causing devastating loss of physiological function to the wounded warfighter. In addition to paralysis, service members living with these injuries exhibit increased long-term morbidity due to factors such as respiratory and cardiovascular complications. Bridging the Gap Plus (BG+), a new DARPA program that combines neurotechnology, artificial intelligence, and biological sensors, opens the possibility of overcoming the worst effects of spinal cord injuries by promoting healing at the wound site and interfacing with the nervous system at points around the body to restore natural functions such as breathing, bowel and bladder control, movement, touch, and proprioception that can be lost when the spinal cord is damaged.

DARPA launched the Safe Genes program in 2017 to establish a “safety by design” strategy for guiding the development of an array of powerful, emergent genome editing technologies. Consistent with the National Biodefense Strategy published last year, DARPA’s goals for Safe Genes are to mitigate the risks and security concerns related to the accidental or intentional misuse of such technologies and, at the same time, enable the pursuit of novel genetic solutions that support public health and military force protection and readiness.

There are a vast number of diverse computing devices used to run the critical infrastructure our national security depends on – from transportation systems to electric grids to industrial equipment. Much like commercial or personal computing devices, these systems utilize embedded software to execute and manage their operations. To fix certain security vulnerabilities, commercial and personal devices must undergo frequent updates, and are replaced every few years – or on occasion, more frequently when an update fails. Mission-critical systems are built to last for decades, and rarely have the same short upgrade cycles.

DARPA’s Operational Fires (OpFires) program has reached a major program milestone, completing booster preliminary design review of an innovative two-stage tactical missile system. OpFires aims to develop and demonstrate a ground-launched hypersonic weapon system to engage critical, time-sensitive targets in contested environments.

Cities present multiple challenges for ground units as they attempt to navigate and search tall buildings amid tight spaces with limited sight lines. DARPA’s OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program envisions swarms of collaborative autonomous systems to provide insights to dismounted troops in urban environments. The OFFSET program is seeking proposals for its fifth swarm sprint, focused on two topics: operational swarm tactics in support of urban missions and innovative technologies to prototype and integrate into physical swarm system testbeds.

Computing performance has steadily increased against the trajectory set by Moore’s Law, and networking performance has accelerated at a similar rate. Despite these connected evolutions in network and server technology however, the network stack, starting with the network interface card (NIC) – or the hardware that bridges the network/server boundary – has not kept pace. Today, network interface hardware is hampering data ingest from the network to processing hardware. Additional factors, such as limitations in server memory technologies, memory copying, poor application design, and competition for shared resources, has resulted in network subsystems that are creating a bottleneck within the network stack and are throttling application throughput.

In the wake of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the mental health crisis among U.S. military veterans remains unrelenting, despite the best efforts of healthcare researchers and providers to confront the scale and scope of the problem. According to a 2018 report from the Department of Veterans Affairs, an average of twenty U.S. veterans commit suicide each day.

DARPA today announced the 10 teams that have qualified for the Championship Event of the Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2) – a three-year contest to unlock the potential of the radio frequency (RF) spectrum using artificial intelligence (AI). The teams will head to Mobile World Congress Los Angeles on October 23, 2019, where their radio designs will go head to head during a live competition. The first, second, and third place winners will walk away with $2 million, $1 million, and $750,000 prizes, respectively.

Over the past three years, DARPA’s Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2) has relied on a custom-built virtual testbed called the Colosseum to host thousands of competitive matches and scrimmages, which will include the final match to determine the winner of the $2 million grand prize. Supporting SC2’s mission to reimagine new spectrum access strategies in which radio networks autonomously collaborate to determine how the RF spectrum should be used moment-to-moment required the development of a research environment capable of emulating communication signals at real-world scope and scale.

The threat of manipulated multi-modal media – which includes audio, images, video, and text – is increasing as automated manipulation technologies become more accessible, and social media continues to provide a ripe environment for viral content sharing. The creators of convincing media manipulations are no longer limited to groups with significant resources and expertise. Today, an individual content creator has access to capabilities that could enable the development of an altered media asset that creates a believable, but falsified, interaction or scene.

Subterranean (SubT) Challenge Systems teams are trekking toward the Urban Circuit after competing in the Tunnel Circuit, the first scored event of DARPA’s high-tech underground contest. Eleven teams from eight countries gathered in Pittsburgh, August 15-22, 2019, to attempt to map, identify, and report artifacts along the passages of two Pittsburgh mines. With them, they brought 20 unmanned aerial vehicles, 64 ground robots, and one autonomous blimp robot named Duckiefloat.

Many of today’s communications, navigation, financial transaction, distributed cloud, and defense applications rely on the precision timing of atomic clocks – or clocks that track time based on the oscillation of atoms with the highest degrees of accuracy. Harnessing the power of atoms for precise timing requires a host of sophisticated and bulky technologies that are costly to develop and consume large amounts of energy. New applications and technologies like 5G networks and GPS alternatives will require precise timekeeping on portable platforms, driving a demand for miniaturized atomic clocks with a high degree of performance.

The military relies on advanced imaging systems for a number of critical capabilities and applications – from Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) and situational awareness to weapon sights. These powerful systems enable defense users to capture and analyze visual data, providing key insights both on and off the battlefield. Today, nearly all imaging systems rely on detector arrays fabricated using planar processes developed for electronic integrated circuits on flat silicon.

During the second field experiment for DARPA’s OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program, teams of autonomous air and ground robots tested tactics on a mission to isolate an urban objective. Similar to the way a firefighting crew establishes a boundary around a burning building, they first identified locations of interest and then created a perimeter around the focal point.

The tremendous ability of the U.S. military to project power entails an equally imposing logistical chain to maintain stocks of food, water, medicines, fuel, and other supplies critical to troops and equipment. That chain gets stretched to extremes when the military is called upon to rapidly deploy anywhere in the world and sustain operations without the benefit of fixed infrastructure.

Department of Defense (DOD) systems and platforms are composed of numerous integrated cyber-physical subsystems, which create an enormous amount of complexity and makes their engineering a daunting task. Today, designing cyber-physical systems (CPS) requires an army of skilled engineers with the right domain expertise, and hundreds of domain-specific tools. The process used to design these systems is largely manual, creating long design cycles that often result in costly redesigns after building and testing the systems. The flaws in the process are numerous – from balancing predictability with cost-efficiency to operating under tight time constraints to integrating disparate pieces from multiple design teams.

This month, DARPA will bring a demonstration version of a secure voting ballot box equipped with hardware defenses in development on the System Security Integrated Through Hardware and Firmware (SSITH) program to the DEF CON 2019 Voting Machine Hacking Village (Voting Village). The SSITH program is developing methodologies and design tools that enable the use of hardware advances to protect systems against software exploitation of hardware vulnerabilities. To evaluate progress on the program, DARPA is incorporating the secure processors researchers are developing into a secure voting ballot box and turning the system loose for public assessment by thousands of hackers and DEF CON community members.

There are times when the highest levels of privacy and security are required to protect a piece of information, but there is still a need to prove the information’s existence and accuracy. For the Department of Defense (DoD), the proof could be the verification of a relevant capability. How can one verify this capability without revealing any sensitive details about it? In the commercial world, this struggle manifests itself across banking transactions, cybersecurity threat disclosure, and beyond.

Over the past few decades, DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office (MTO) has enabled revolutionary advances in electronics materials, devices, and systems, which have provided the United States with unique defense and economic advantages. To continue its path of successful electronics innovation, DARPA today announced a new MTO effort called the Microsystems Exploration program. The Microsystems Exploration program will constitute a series of short-term investments into high-risk, high-reward research focused on technical domains relevant to MTO.

DARPA’s Squad X Experimentation program aims to demonstrate a warfighting force with artificial intelligence as a true partner. In a recent field test, the program worked with U.S. Marines at the Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, California, to track progress on two complementary systems that allow infantry squads to collaborate with AI and autonomous systems to make better decisions in complex, time-critical combat situations.

The Department of Defense (DoD) increasingly relies on software systems to deliver needed functionality, capabilities, and security. However, the rapid pace of software innovation, evolving regulatory requirements, an ever-growing need for stronger system security, and other factors require continual updating and modernization efforts. These produce untenable increases in system complexity and shift the bulk of system costs and developer focus from design and development to maintenance. As this trend continues, the cost and effort required to maintain current systems might constrain DoD’s ability to develop new software-based capabilities.

As some 300,000 cheering race fans packed the stands at this year’s Indianapolis 500, behind the scenes an advanced network of sensors kept constant vigilance, providing security officials real-time awareness of any potential weapon-of-mass-destruction/terror (WMD/WMT) threat. The deployment marked the first time that DARPA’s SIGMA+ network seamlessly integrated radiological and chemical sensors with biological threat sensors from the Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction (CWMD) Office.

The DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge opened the Virtual Tunnel Circuit competition July 1 with nine teams vying for a top finish in the event and $500,000 in prizes. Teams that have already qualified can submit their virtual entries at the SubT Virtual Portal during the submission window, which remains open through August 1, 2019. Selecting from a repository of robot models and a variety of sensors, each team can assemble a fantasy sports-style solution to map, navigate, and search the dark, dangerous, and unpredictable underground scenarios.

Breakthroughs in the science of programmable gene expression inspired DARPA to establish the PReemptive Expression of Protective Alleles and Response Elements (PREPARE) program with the goal of delivering powerful new defenses against public health and national security threats. DARPA has now selected five teams to develop a range of new medical interventions that temporarily and reversibly modulate the expression of protective genes to guard against acute threats from influenza and ionizing radiation, which could be encountered naturally, occupationally, or through a national security event.

X-rays and gamma rays have a wide range of applications including scanning suspicious maritime shipping containers for illicit materials, industrial inspection of materials and processes, and medical diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. Current technologies, however, are not ideal. X-rays produce a continuum of energies that limit their inspection and diagnostic performance, and gamma rays can only be produced at specific energies unique to a given radioactive isotope.

For the second year in a row, DARPA is convening the electronics community to discuss the ambitions and achievements of its five-year, upwards of $1.5 billion investment in U.S. microelectronics advancement. Attendees at the second annual Electronics Resurgence Initiative (ERI) Summit – being held July 15-17 in Detroit, Michigan – will hear from commercial and defense leaders as they share their insights on the domestic semiconductor industry and the applications driving next-generation electronics.

The Department of Defense (DoD)’s Joint Logistics Enterprise, which spans both supply chain and logistics operations, provides the means to muster, transport, and sustain military power anywhere in the world at a high level of readiness. To operate successfully in an increasingly contested global security environment, however, the logistics enterprise needs to change how it operates. In particular, the enterprise needs to overcome its reliance on thousands of disparate legacy information systems, which can’t provide the status of millions of military parts, supplies, and pieces of equipment, which are stocked and shipped around the world.