Program Summary
Current obscurants are common military tools used to protect warfighters from detection by adversary’s vision and sensors. However, despite decades of development, obscurants have significant limitations: (1) they simultaneously degrade the visual capability of friendly forces in addition to adversary forces; (2) once deployed, their performance is fixed and cannot be tuned in real time; and (3) they pose a serious health risk, requiring the use of respirators.
The goal of the DARPA Coded Visibility program is to address these limitations by developing next-generation obscurant systems that provide warfighters an asymmetric advantage, enhancing their visibility while suppressing adversary visibility and detection.
Coded Visibility will explore passive methods to achieve this asymmetry (i.e., passive asymmetry), using tailorable obscurants deployed in relevant environments. Additionally, Coded Visibility will focus on the longer-term technical goal of actively modulating novel particulates, potentially enabling dynamic control of an obscurant’s properties post-deployment and cooperation with sensor modalities (i.e., active asymmetry). Across both passive and active thrusts, the program will focus on identifying obscurants that are safe for the warfighter.
Performers awarded contracts for this program: Raytheon Technologies Research Center | Northeastern University |Signature Research, Inc. | Georgia Tech Research Corporation