In collaboration with the Department of Defense’s Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO), DARPA initiated the Vehicle and Dismount Exploitation Radar (VADER) program to design and deploy a radar system for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or small manned aircraft. 

Developed for DARPA by Northrop Grumman Electronic Systems, VADER provided synthetic aperture radar and ground moving-target indicator data to detect, localize, and track vehicles and dismounted troops.

Intrachip/Interchip Enhanced Cooling (ICECool) The increased density of electronic components and subsystems in military electronic systems exacerbates the thermal management challenges facing engineers. 

The military platforms that host these systems often cannot physically accommodate the large cooling systems needed for thermal management, meaning that heat can be a limiting factor for performance of electronics and embedded computers.

For years, DARPA and its Service partners pursued the technically daunting task of developing high-power-density, wide-band-gap semiconductor components in the recognition that, whatever the end-state task, U.S. forces would need electronics that could operate and engage at increasing range. 

The result was a series of fundamental advances involving gallium nitride-enabled arrays, which now provide significant benefits in a wide range of applications in the national security domain.

The Atlas disaster-response robot made its public debut on July 11, 2013. 

In its original form, the 6’2”, 330-lb. humanoid robot—developed for DARPA by Boston Dynamics of Waltham, Mass.—was capable of a range of natural movements. A tether connected the robot to both an off-board power supply and computer through which a human operator issued commands. 

To help alleviate physical weight on troops, DARPA developed a four-legged robot, the Legged Squad Support System (LS3), to integrate with squads of Marines or Soldiers. 

LS3 demonstrated that a highly mobile, semi-autonomous legged robot could carry 400 lbs of a squads load, follow squad members through rugged terrain and interact with troops in a natural way, similar to a trained animal and its handler.

DARPA and key companies from the semiconductor and defense industries established the Semiconductor Technology Advanced Research Network, or STARnet.

This effort, which lasted until 2017 when it was superseded by a similar program known as JUMP, supported large university communities to look beyond the current evolutionary directions in microelectronics research and development. 

This community of leading academics was supported by resources and expertise of DARPA and participating companies, including at least $40 million each year in basic research funding.

Under a DARPA contract, the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) developed the Blast Gauge, a small device worn by warfighters to measure blast exposure and cue medics for initial response. 

This phase of the project took just 11 months with a total development cost of approximately $1 million. As field tests began, and design refinement and larger production quantities were required, RIT researchers formed BlackBox Biometrics, a small business to commercialize and manufacture the Blast Gauges. 

The Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordnance (EXACTO) program conducted the first successful live-fire tests demonstrating in-flight guidance of .50-caliber bullets. EXACTO rounds maneuvered in flight to hit targets that were offset from where the sniper rifle was aimed. 

EXACTO’s specially designed ammunition and real-time optical guidance system help track and direct projectiles to their targets during flight by compensating for weather, wind, target movement, and other factors that could impede successful hits.

In 2014, 15 teams from around the United States participated in the final event of the DARPA Spectrum Challenge, a competition designed to encourage development of programmable radios that can deliver high-priority transmissions in congested and contested spectrum environments. 

DARPA rolled out its Memex program to move forward the state of the art in content indexing and web searching on the Internet. 

Over the next few years, the Memex program yielded new tools that enabled quick and thorough organization of a subset of the Internet, leading to more comprehensive and relevant domain-specific indexing of web content and domain-specific search capabilities.