News

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.

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.

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 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 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).

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

DARPA’s High-speed Optimized Handling of Holiday Operations (HO HO HO) initiative is celebrating its fourth anniversary this year, and the Agency is proud to continue its tradition of sharing breakthrough technologies to help Santa Claus and his elves more quickly and efficiently complete their holiday duties.

Underground settings are becoming increasingly relevant to global security and safety. Rising populations and urbanization are requiring military and civilian first responders to perform their duties below ground in human-made tunnels, underground urban spaces, and natural cave networks. Recognizing that innovative, enhanced technologies could accelerate development of critical lifesaving capabilities, DARPA today announced its newest challenge: the DARPA Subterranean Challenge.

Competitors from around the world came together this month for the preliminary round of DARPA’s Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2) at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, MD. This was the first event of the three-year long tournament designed to generate new wireless paradigms and access strategies in which radio networks enhanced with artificial intelligence (AI) will autonomously collaborate and reason about how to share the increasingly congested electromagnetic (EM) spectrum.

The DARPA Bay Area Software Defined Radio (SDR) Hackfest came to a close on Friday, November 17 at the NASA Ames Conference Center in Moffett Field, CA. During the weeklong event, over 150 members of the SDR community came together to discuss, innovate, and ideate around the future of software radio technology and its potential to address challenging communications issues that are emerging due to the increasingly congested electromagnetic (EM) spectrum and the proliferation of wireless-enabled devices.

The internet of things connects an ever-growing number of smart devices for up-to-the-minute monitoring and tracking of many common events. Head out to most parts of the open ocean, however, and no such capability exists for real-time monitoring of maritime activity.

Subterranean warfare—whether involving human-made tunnels, underground urban infrastructure, or natural cave networks—has been an element of U.S. military operations from World War II and Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan. As above-ground commercial and military intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities continue to grow more capable and ubiquitous, adversaries are increasingly heading underground to circumvent detection.

Few military requirements are as enduring as the need for timely, accurate information.

To meet this demand, the Department of Defense invests heavily in the development of powerful electronic and mechanical sensors, and in the manpower to maintain and operate those sensors. DARPA has been involved on the research side of the equation since the Agency’s earliest days, developing technologies such as the VELA satellites and seismographs to ensure Soviet compliance with the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

A unique class of engineered light-manipulating materials, known as metamaterials or structured materials, makes use of patterns of strongly interacting wavelength or sub-wavelength-sized elements. Because of these intricate internal and surface structures, new properties have emerged, some exhibiting behavior that has resulted in rewriting long-understood “laws” for how light and other electromagnetic (EM) waves interact with materials. These materials have been opening up new options for controlling EM waves in many technological arenas, among them imaging, thermal control, and frequency conversion. Specific applications include night-vision, heat reflection and management in aircraft engines, and temperature regulation of electronics on satellites in the hot-and-cold extremes of space.

The Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, Ms. Ellen M. Lord, today announced the appointment of Dr. Steven H. Walker as the 21st director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). A former DARPA program manager, deputy office director, and office director, Walker has devoted 13 of his more than 30 years of public service to the Agency and been a key figure in advancing the science and technologies associated with hypersonic flight and rapid access to space.

The increased use of wireless and internet-enabled devices – from computers to home appliances – and the data they generate are creating opportunities and challenges for the defense and commercial sectors. To help explore and better understand the complex relationship created by the intersection of physical and cyber technology within the ever more congested electromagnetic spectrum, DARPA program manager Tom Rondeau embarked on a year-long effort to build an engaged community of engineers and scientists operating within relevant technical areas. The results of these efforts will culminate in November during the weeklong DARPA Bay Area Software Defined Radio (SDR) Hackfest at NASA Ames Conference Center in Moffett Field, California.

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 capabilities to the field.

The rapid pace of new commercial satellite constellation launches has led to a significant increase in the amount and availability of geospatial imagery. Unfortunately, no straightforward way currently exists for analysts to access and analyze all of that imagery. The current ad hoc, time-intensive approach requires gathering and curating data from a large number of available sources, downloading it to specific locations, and running it through separate suites of analytics tools.

“Rules of the road”—widely accepted norms of safety-related behavior based on common understanding—have existed in various forms over the centuries, and have evolved as new technologies have revolutionized how people and vehicles travel. But how are these “rules” created when common understanding of new capabilities is not yet established? This question plays directly into why DARPA has initiated its Consortium for Execution of Rendezvous and Servicing Operations (CONFERS) program, with Phase 1 awarded to a team led by Advanced Technology International (ATI), based in Summerville, S.C.

DARPA’s Video Synthetic Aperture Radar (ViSAR) program recently completed flight tests, successfully demonstrating a new sensor that can capture real-time video through clouds.