Tag Archives: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)

Whoever Controls Space Controls Everything

The U.S. military wants allies to train and plan together for space operations, in the same way that they already do in ground, air and naval combat, Gen. Chance Saltzman, chief of space operations, said in an interview in July 2023. The move comes amid concerns about China and Russia’s ability to disrupt the West’s satellites and new technology the two countries have developed, including satellites that can grab others…

Russia, for instance, has conducted operations to disrupt Ukraine’s space-enabled communications. Saltzman said that Russia has been sending satellites “irresponsibly close” to those of other nations to shadow them. Moscow has “nesting doll” satellites, which can release an object that can be used to attack other objects in space, while China has tested robotic arms that can be used to grab other satellites. Both countries have demonstrated missiles that can destroy orbiting satellites…

“Quantity is a quality in itself,” he said, using an expression often employed in the military. For example, the satellites of a large coalition would be harder to target than those of one nation, he added.

Excerpt from Alistair MacDonald, U.S. Pushes Military Cooperation in Space, WSJ, July 18, 2023

How to Track 1,000 People at the Same Time

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DARPA is striving to help the military keep track of up to 1,000 targets on earth through the development of new satellite software–a program called ‘Oversight.’

From the DARPA website: DARPA, the U.S. Space Force, and the Space Development Agency (SDA) are developing new satellite constellations to increase the tactical capabilities of U.S. space systems…’Oversight’ seeks software solutions to enable autonomous constant custody, or knowledge of target location within accuracies necessary for mission needs, of up to 1,000 targets from space assets through management of available satellite hardware resources. The project aims to support both peacetime and wartime monitoring of high value targets in contested environments where resources and targets may be highly dynamic.

Current practices require human operators for exquisite satellite solutions. This arrangement does not scale well for the numbers of targets that Oversight is considering. Reliance on individual ground station operators significantly increases latency and minimizes tactical utility of satellite sensor data. Oversight will develop the autonomy necessary to track targets with the operator overseeing at an aggregate level. It will also leverage existing and/or state-of-the-art networks to provide collaboration between satellite and ground resources.

The Military Internet: DARPA, Amazon and Space X

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Satellites are crucial military infrastructure for spying and communications. They are also vulnerable to attack and disruption. In November 2021, three months before it invaded Ukraine, Russia fired a missile into a defunct satellite. Then, in October, a Russian diplomat declared even commercial satellites could be legitimate targets. Satellite systems used by Ukraine have been hacked and jammed. Ground antennae have been attacked.

In light of this sort of thing, America’s military establishment is worried that its satellite network is not up to snuff. But it has a plan. The Space-Based Adaptive Communications Node (Space-BACN, or “Space Bacon”) will, if successful, create a laser-enabled military internet in orbit around Earth by piggybacking on a number of satellites that would have been launched anyway.

Space Bacon is a brainchild of DARPA, the special-projects research arm of the Department of Defense, and is an intriguing orbiting echo of the original, terrestrial ARPNET, which evolved into the internet…The plan is to fit as many newly launched satellites as possibly with laser transceivers that will be able to communicate with counterparts as far away as 5,000km. Satellite owners will pay for these transceivers, but will then receive payments from the American government for their use.

Space Bacon promises many benefits. Unlike radio, the normal mode of communication with and between satellites, transmissions by laser beam are hard to intercept and almost impossible to jam. Indeed, adversaries might not even know when a transmission is taking place, a bonus for operational secrecy.

DARPA wants Space Bacon to cost a maximum of $100,000 a satellite, the better to encourage participation. It bodes well that Amazon, SpaceX and Viasat are all designing command-and-control architectures for Space Bacon.

Excerpts from DARPA, lasers and an internet in orbit, Economist, Feb. 11, 2023

Bacteria Can Rescue World One Building at a Time

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Concrete is one of the world’s most important materials. But making the cement that binds it generates about 8% of anthropogenic carbon-dioxide emissions. This is not just because of the heat involved. That could, in principle, be supplied in environmentally friendly ways. It is, rather, embedded in the very chemistry of the process. The heat is applied to limestone, to break up its principal constituent, calcium carbonate, into calcium oxide (cement’s crucial ingredient) and CO2…

Intriguingly, this may be an area where microbes can come to the rescue….One proposal is to recruit the services of chlorophyll-laden, photosynthezing organisms called cyanobacteria. That has allowed Prometheus Materials, a firm in Colorado, to develop a cement-making process in which the energy comes not from heat but light—something easily generated from electricity that has, in turn, been provided by renewable sources. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, photosynthesis subtracts CO2 from the atmosphere rather than adding it.…

Applications for biocement extend beyond conventional construction, too. America’s Department of Defense, for one, has shown interest. Its aim is to be able to build things in remote areas without having to hump in cement and other materials. That would be doubly valuable if the territory through which the humping would otherwise be happening were hostile. Indeed, it was the Defense Department that catalyzed the formation of Prometheus, by awarding the team at the University of Colorado which later founded the firm a grant of $1.8m back in 2017.

The department is also, in the guise of the Defen s e Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Air Force Research Laboratory, collaborating with Biomason to develop biocement sprays that can turn sand or loose soil into runways. Michael Dosier, Biomason’s chief technologist (and the boss’s husband), says the hardening involved could require less than 72 hours.

Kathleen Hicks, America’s deputy secretary of defense, during a talk at the DARPA Forward conference, outlined a goal that is literally out of this world: an ability to spray a bacterial liquid on lunar or Martian regolith, in order to “grow a landing pad”.

Excerpts Green Construction: Building with Bacteria, Economist, Nov. 26, 2022

Geo-engineering Wars and Termination Shock

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What if a country experiencing the bad effects of climate change—crop failures, perhaps, or serious flooding—were to begin, unilaterally and perhaps quietly, to try to modify the climate? Such a project, reckons DARPA, a research arm of America’s defence department, is possible. But it could trigger chaos, and not just of the meteorological sort. The agency, the overall objectives of which include preventing “strategic surprise”, has therefore recently begun to pay for research into how such an event might happen, and how to react to it.

DARPA’s assumption is that any attempt at unilateral geoengineering would use a technique called stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI). This would employ aircraft to disperse sulfuric acid, or its precursor sulfur dioxide, into the upper atmosphere, to form tiny sulfate particles that would reflect sunlight back into space. This would probably work (big volcanic eruptions, which do something similar, have a measurable effect on global temperatures). The costs, though, could be considerable—and not just directly in dollars.

A poorly designed SAI program might break down ozone, a form of oxygen that shields organisms, people included, from harmful ultraviolet radiation. Patterns of precipitation would also change, for cooler air absorbs less moisture, and these effects would undoubtedly vary from region to region. Another problem is the acid rain that would result.

Perhaps most pertinent, though, is that SAI would serve only to mask the effects of greenhouse gases rather than ending them. That brings the risk of “termination shock”, for the injected sulfate is constantly washed out of the atmosphere in rain and snow. The closure of and SAI program, particularly a long-lasting one, might thus cause a sudden heat jolt more difficult to deal with than the existing, gradual, warming.

That is one reason why Joshua Elliott, head of DARPA’s AI-assisted Climate Tipping-point Modelling (ACTM) program, says “we do not want to be caught flat-footed”. Modelling how Earth’s various climactic subsystems might react to SAI is no easy matter. Dr Elliott, however, reckons that better computer simulations would help. They might even, he says, eventually highlight “signatures” in climate data that would suggest that such geoengineering is afoot.

Nor is the risk of someone doing something stupid a fantasy. In 2019 Massimo Tavoni, a game theorist at Milan Polytechnic who is unaffiliated with DARPA organized six games played by 144 students. Participants were given a variety of ideal climate outcomes and allowed to spend toy money they were given on geoengineering projects to achieve them…Some players tried to counter efforts at cooling which they deemed excessive with attempts to warm the planet, resulting in a chaotic outcome that Dr Tavoni calls “geoengineering wars”. In the end, he says, “everybody loses.”…

DARPA is also developing “early warning” code to detect people undertaking geoengineering mischief on the sly, and testing it by running pairs of parallel simulations, one of which has been tweaked to reflect an SAI program being under way…SAI could even, conceivably, be undertaken by “self-authorizing” billionaires.

Areas which suffer most from rising temperatures would have greater incentives to take the plunge…including Algeria, Australia, Bangladesh, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Libya, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Thailand.

Excerpts from America’s defense department is looking for rogue geoengineers, Economist, Nov. 5, 2022

The Space Internet: Space Bacon-DARPA

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DARPA’s Space-Based Adaptive Communications Node (Space-BACN) would allow seamless communication between various constellations of satellites that currently cannot talk to each other.

“There could be tens of thousands of small satellites launched into Low Earth Orbit over the next decade as the demand around the world for affordable space-based capabilities grows,” said Greg Kuperman, Space-BACN program manager in DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office. “The problem with this growth is that optical communications links are currently engineered to only connect satellites within a given constellation – they can’t dynamically adapt waveforms to communicate with satellites in other constellations. This lack of standardization results in a fragmented, stove-piped ‘Wild West’ space domain with new satellite constellations that can’t interoperate, government satellites that can’t communicate between one another, and government satellites unable to take advantage of emerging commercial communications capabilities.”

Space-BACN envisions an adaptable communications terminal that could be reconfigured on-orbit to talk across different standards, presenting a leap in technology from the current state of the art. Space-BACN will involve inter alia a novel cross-constellation command and control approach to automate interactions between government and commercial satellites.

Space-BACN has significant military and civilian uses.

Excerpts from Adaptable Optical Communications to Facilitate Future Low-Earth Orbit Networks

Do It 100 Trillion Times Faster! Race Quantum Supremacy

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The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiative is looking in a full picture of how quantum computing will shape the next 30 years of computing. In April 2021, the agency embarked on a new initiative to support the development of quantum computers. Called the Quantum Benchmarking program, the effort aims to establish key quantum-computing metrics and then make those metrics testable.

“It’s really about developing quantum computing yardsticks that can accurately measure what’s important to focus on in the race toward large, fault-tolerant quantum computers,” Joe Altepeter, program manager in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office, said in an agency announcement. Historically, the U.S. has invested heavily in quantum science research, but it has not had a full national strategy to coordinate those efforts. The December 2018 National Quantum Initiative Act kickstarted the federal approach to accelerate quantum research and development for an initial five-year period.

Developing metrics would also help quantify and understand how transformative large quantum computers could be. ..The 2018 legislation also established various research centers and partnerships for quantum computing, such as the Quantum Economic Development Consortium comprising government, private and public entities. Under these partnerships, researchers have explored how quantum computing interacts with other technologies, like artificial intelligence, to impact health care. “One of the applications we’re excited about is enabling drug discovery. We want to investigate if we can help the pharmaceuticals industry,” said Altepeter…

“[Quantum computers] could be transformative and the most important technology we’ve ever seen, or they can be totally useless and these gigantic paperweights that are sitting in labs across the country. That window of potential surprise is the key. That’s the kind of surprise that DARPA cannot allow to exist,” said Altepeter. “It’s our job to make sure that we eliminate those kinds of surprises — hence why we wanted to do this program.”

Excerpts from Sarah Sybert, DARPA Aims for Quantum-Computing Benchmarks in New Program, https://governmentciomedia.com/, June 21, 2021

A team of Chinese scientists has developed the most powerful quantum computer in the world, capable of performing at least one task 100 trillion times faster than the world’s fastest supercomputers…In 2019, Google said it had built the first machine to achieve “quantum supremacy,” the first to outperform the world’s best supercomputers at quantum calculation. In December 2020, a Chinese team, based at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, reported their quantum computer, named Jiuzhang, is 10 billion times faster than Google’s. Assuming both claims hold up, Jiuzhang would be the second quantum computer to achieve quantum supremacy anywhere in the world.

The Reckless Gambles that Changed the World: darpa

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Using messenger RNA to make vaccines was an unproven idea. But if it worked, the technique would revolutionize medicine, not least by providing protection against infectious diseases and biological weapons. So in 2013 America’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) gambled. It awarded a small, new firm called Moderna $25m to develop the idea. Eight years, and more than 175m doses later, Moderna’s covid-19 vaccine sits alongside weather satellites, GPS, drones, stealth technology, voice interfaces, the personal computer and the internet on the list of innovations for which DARPA can claim at least partial credit.

It is the agency that shaped the modern world, and this success has spurred imitators. In America there are ARPAS for homeland security, intelligence and energy, as well as the original defense one…Germany has recently established two such agencies: one civilian (the Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation, or SPRIN-d) and another military (the Cybersecurity Innovation Agency). Japan’s interpretation is called Moonshot R&D.

As governments across the rich world begin, after a four-decade lull, to spend more on research and development, the idea of an agency to invent the future (and, in so doing, generate vast industries) is alluring and, the success of DARPA suggests, no mere fantasy. In many countries there is displeasure with the web of bureaucracy that entangles funding systems, and hope that the DARPA model can provide a way of getting around it. But as some have discovered, and others soon will, copying DARPA requires more than just copying the name. It also needs commitment to the principles which made the original agency so successful—principles that are often uncomfortable for politicians.

On paper, the approach is straightforward. Take enormous, reckless gambles on things so beneficial that only a handful need work to make the whole venture a success. As Arun Majumdar, founding director of ARPA-e, America’s energy agency, puts it: “If every project is succeeding, you’re not trying hard enough.” Current (unclassified) DAROA projects include mimicking insects’ nervous systems in order to reduce the computation required for artificial intelligence and working out how to protect soldiers from the enemy’s use of genome-editing technologies.

The result is a mirror image of normal R&D agencies. Whereas most focus on basic research, DARPA builds things. Whereas most use peer review and carefully selected measurements of progress, DARPA strips bureaucracy to the bones (the conversation in 1965 which led the agency to give out $1m for the first cross-country computer network, a forerunner to the internet, took just 15 minutes). All work is contracted out. DARPA has a boss, a small number of office directors and fewer than 100 program managers, hired on fixed short-term contracts, who act in a manner akin to venture capitalists, albeit with the aim of generating specific outcomes rather than private returns.

Excerpt from Inventing the future: A growing number of governments hope to clone America’s DARPA, Economist, June 5, 2021

Building Factories in Space: DARPA

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DARPA announced on February 5, 2021 its Novel Orbital and Moon Manufacturing, Materials and Mass-efficient Design (NOM4D) program. The effort, pronounced “NOMAD,” seeks to pioneer technologies for adaptive, off-earth manufacturing to produce large space and lunar structures, “NOM4D’s vision is to develop foundational materials, processes, and designs needed to realize in-space manufacturing of large, precise, and resilient Defense Department systems,” said Bill Carter, program manager in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office. “We will also explore the unique features of in-situ resources obtained from the moon’s surface as they apply to future defense missions.” …

Concerning mass-efficient designs, the vision is for completely new concepts that could only be manufactured in space….In order to take the next step, we’ve got to go about materials, manufacturing, and design in a completely new way.

Excerpts from Orbital Construction: DARPA Pursues Plan for Robust Manufacturing in Space, DARPA Website, Feb. 5, 2021

What is the Sea Train? DARPA

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DARPA’s The Sea Train program aims to demonstrate long range deployment capabilities for a distributed fleet of tactical unmanned surface vessels. The program seeks to enable extended transoceanic transit and long-range naval operations by exploiting the efficiencies of a system of connected vessels (Sea Train). The goal is to develop and demonstrate approaches that exploit wave-making resistance reductions to overcome the range limitations inherent in medium unmanned surface vessels. DARPA envisions sea trains formed by physically connecting vessels with various degrees of freedom between the vessels, or vessels sailing in collaborative formations at various distances between the vessels. The weak of October 5, 2020, DARPA awarded Gibbs & Cox a separate $9.5 million contract to develop a “Connectorless Sea Train” concept.

Dr. Andrew Nuss, Sea Train

Under Zero Trust: the U.S. Chip Resurgence

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The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency launched its Electronic Resurgence Initiative (ERI) to help reboot a domestic chip industry that has been moving steadily offshore for decades…. Program officials and chip industry executives foresee the emergence of a “5th generation of computing” based on current cloud infrastructure while combining AI, the Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G wireless networks to deliver big data.

“The U.S. microelectronics industry is at an inflection point,” Ellen Lord, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, told the virtual ERI summit. After decades of offshoring of chip fabrication, packaging and testing capabilities, “How do we reverse this trend?” The Defense Department is expanding its technology base efforts by implementing a “step-by-step process for reconstituting the microelectronics supply chain,” focusing on various segments of the semiconductor ecosystem, including memory devices, logic, ICs and advanced packaging along with testing and assembly.

“While DoD does not drive the electronics market,” constituting only about 1 percent of demand, “we can drive significant R&D,” ERI is advancing public-private partnerships that provide a framework for commercial innovation. The result would be “pathfinder projects” geared toward a renewal of U.S. chip manufacturing. As trade frictions with China grow, ERI is placing greater focus on ensuring the pedigree of U.S. electronics supply chain. “We need to find a path to domestic sources,” said Lord.

While nurturing government-industry partnerships as part of an emerging next-generation U.S. industrial policy, this year’s DARPA summit also emphasized chip standards and processes for securing fabs, foundry services, devices and foundational microelectronics. In that vein, U.S. officials stressed new chips metrics like “quantifiable assurance” to secure dual-use devices that could end up in weapons or an IoT device.

“Our interests to protect both the confidentiality and the integrity of our supply chain are aligned with commercial interests, and we will continue to work across government and industry to develop and implement our quantitative assurance strategy based on zero trust,” said Nicole Petta, principal director of DoD’s microelectronics office. The “zero trust” approach assumes no device is safe, and that all microelectronics components must be validated before deployment. The framework marks a philosophical departure from DoD’s “trusted foundry” approach instituted in the 1990s, largely because “perimeter defenses” failed to account for insider threats…

DARPA Chip Efforts Pivots to Securing US Supply Chain, https://www.hpcwire.com, Aug. 24, 2020

Even the Oceans are not Free: Swarming the Seas

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The Ocean of Things of Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) aims to wire up the high seas with swarms of floating, connected sensors. Such devices are not in themselves new. There are around 6,000 floating sensors deployed around the world’s oceans, run by navies and research institutes. What is unprecedented is the scale of DARPA’s ambition. Over the next few years it hopes to deploy 50,000 sensors across 1m square kilometres of sea, an area considerably larger than Texas. The eventual goal—much more distant—is to enable the continuous monitoring and analysis of a significant fraction of the world’s oceans.

Existing “floating instrument packages”, known as floats or drifters, are often custom-built, and usually contain the highest-quality instruments available. They therefore tend to be expensive, and are bought only in small numbers. A typical existing float, designed for scientific research, is the Argo. It costs around $20,000, and can measure water temperature and salinity. The Ocean of Things takes the opposite approach. The aim is to cram as many cheap, off-the-shelf components as possible into a single low-cost package. Current float prototypes cost around $750…That would allow tens of thousands to be deployed without breaking the bank. Large numbers are crucial for coverage. They also help compensate for inaccuracies in individual instruments.

The project’s researchers are evaluating three designs from different manufacturers, ranging in size from about six to 18 litres. One, proposed by Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre, is made of glass, like a traditional Japanese fishing float. A second, from a firm called Areté Associates, has an aluminium shell, and uses wood for buoyancy. Both models feature solar panels. The third, made by a company called Numurus, is made of lacquered cardboard, and relies entirely on its batteries. All three are designed to last for a year or so and are made to be as environmentally friendly as possible, with minimal use of plastics. That is important because, at the end of their mission, the floats are designed to scuttle themselves…

With 361m square kilometres of ocean on the planet, a true Ocean of Things, monitoring everything on and under the water, would require about 18m floats.

Excerpts from Big Wet Data: The Ocean of Things, Economist, Mar. 14, 2020

How to Detect Nuclear Terrorism in Big Cities

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According to DARPA, terrorist attacks involving the use of proliferated radiological and special nuclear materials pose a potential threat to U.S. citizens and servicemembers. Early detection of such materials and devices made from them is a critical part of the U.S. strategy to prevent attacks. Lower-cost and more sensitive detectors, along with innovative deployment strategies, could significantly enhance detection and deterrence of attack.

The SIGMA program aims to revolutionize detection and deterrent capabilities for countering nuclear terrorism. A key component of SIGMA thus involves developing novel approaches to achieve low-cost, high-efficiency, packaged radiation detectors with spectroscopic gamma and neutron sensing capability. The program will seek to leverage existing infrastructure to help enable these next-generation detectors and their deployment in order to demonstrate game-changing detection and deterrent systems.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency fielded a sensor network to trace radioactive and nuclear materials during the Indianapolis 500 event on June 30, 2019

How to Prepare for Deadly Flu and Nuclear Fallout

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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.

The program builds from the understanding that the human body has innate defenses against many types of health threats, but that the body does not always activate these defenses quickly or robustly enough to block the worst damage. To augment existing physiological responses, PREPARE technologies would provide a programmable capability to up- or down-regulate gene expression on demand, providing timely, scalable defenses that are proportional to anticipated threats. Service members and first responders could administer these interventions prior to threat exposure or therapeutically after exposure to mitigate the risk of harm or death.

Influenza: “Researchers working within the PREPARE program seek to improve rates of survival and recovery in catastrophic scenarios for which reliable and scalable countermeasures don’t currently exist,” said Dr. Renee Wegrzyn, the PREPARE program manager….Three PREPARE teams are pursuing multi-pronged approaches to influenza defense and treatment that use programmable gene modulators to boost the human body’s natural defenses against influenza and also weaken the virus’ ability to cause harm by directly neutralizing the viral genomes. If successful, their approaches would potentially protect against virtually all influenza strains — regardless of whether a virus is newly emergent or has developed drug resistance — and would provide near instantaneous immunity, in contrast to traditional vaccines. Additionally, the teams are designing their countermeasures so that they are simple to deliver — for example, as intranasal sprays — reducing the logistical challenge of protecting large numbers of people.A team led by DNARx LLC, under principal investigator Dr. Robert Debs, aims to develop a new DNA-encoded gene therapy that helps patients fight influenza by boosting the natural immune response and other protective functions of their nasal passages and lungs.

Ionizing Gamma Radiation: Other PREPARE teams are pursuing treatments to protect the body from the effects of ionizing gamma radiation. In humans, radiation poisoning primarily affects stem cells in the blood and gut, yet existing treatments only help to regenerate blood cells, and only with limited effect. There is no possibility for prophylactic administration of these drugs, and most must be delivered immediately following radiation exposure to provide any benefit. There are no existing medical countermeasures for radiation damage to the gut…
A team led by the University of California, San Francisco, under principal investigator Dr. Jonathan Weissman, also aims to develop gene therapies to enhance resilience against ionizing radiation. The team’s approach should result in an intravenous or orally available treatment that activates innate defenses in gut and blood stem cells for a period of several weeks.

A Dose of Inner Strength to Survive and Recover from Potentially Lethal Health Threats
New tools for programmable modulation of gene expression could yield enhanced resilience against influenza and ionizing radiation for service members and first responders, DARPA Press Release, June 27, 2019

Planting Electronics in Brains

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An implantable brain device that literally melts away at a pre-determined rate minimizes injury to tissue normally associated with standard electrode implantation, according to research led by a team from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. …Thin, flexible neural electrode arrays with fully bioresorbable construction based on patterned silicon nanomembranes (Si NMs) as the conducting component.

“Dissolvable silicon electronics offer an unprecedented opportunity to implant advanced monitoring systems that eliminate the risks, cost, and discomfort associated with surgery to extract current devices used for post-operative monitoring,” said senior co-author Brian Litt, MD,….“This study tested the usefulness of temporary, dissolvable monitoring systems capable of providing continuous streams of data for guiding medical care over predetermined periods of time — from days to months — before dissolving.”

The device is made of layers of silicon and molybdenum that can measure physiological characteristics and dissolve at a known rate, as determined by its thickness. For example, the team used the device to record brain waves in rats under anesthesia, as well as voltage fluctuations between neurons (EEGs), and induced epileptic spikes in intact live tissue. A separate experiment demonstrated a complex, multiplexed array made from these materials that could map rat-whisker sensing capabilities at high resolution.

These electrophysiological signals were recorded from devices placed at the surface of the brain cortex (the outer layer of tissue) and the inner space between the scalp and skull. Chronic measurements were made over a 30-day period, while acute experiments demonstrated device operations over three to four hours.

The type of neurophysiologic features measured by the new device are commonly used for diagnosing and treating such disorders as epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, depression, chronic pain, and conditions of the peripheral nervous system. “….

This work was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Penn Medicine Neuroscience Center, and others.

See Next-Gen Electrodes: Proof-of-Concept Animal Study Shows that Flexible, Dissolvable Silicon Electronic Device Holds Promise for Brain Monitoring , Press Release, May 5, 2016

How to Navigate the Rubble: DARPA

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Imagine a natural disaster scenario, such as an earthquake, that inflicts widespread damage to buildings and structures, critical utilities and infrastructure, and threatens human safety. Having the ability to navigate the rubble and enter highly unstable areas could prove invaluable to saving lives or detecting additional hazards among the wreckage.

Dr. Ronald Polcawich, a DARPA program manager in the Microsystems Technology Office (MTO):”There are a number of environments that are inaccessible for larger robotic platforms. Smaller robotics systems could provide significant aide, but shrinking down these platforms requires significant advancement of the underlying technology.”

Technological advances in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), additive manufacturing, piezoelectric actuators, and low-power sensors have allowed researchers to expand into the realm of micro-to-milli robotics. However, due to the technical obstacles experienced as the technology shrinks, these platforms lack the power, navigation, and control to accomplish complex tasks proficiently

To help overcome the challenges of creating extremely [Size, Weight and Power] SWaP-constrained microrobotics, DARPA is launching a new program called SHort-Range Independent Microrobotic Platforms (SHRIMP). The goal of SHRIMP is to develop and demonstrate multi-functional micro-to-milli robotic platforms for use in natural and critical disaster scenarios. To achieve this mission, SHRIMP will explore fundamental research in actuator materials and mechanisms as well as power storage components, both of which are necessary to create the strength, dexterity, and independence of functional microrobotics platforms.

“The strength-to-weight ratio of an actuator influences both the load-bearing capability and endurance of a micro-robotic platform, while the maximum work density characterizes the capability of an actuator mechanism to perform high intensity tasks or operate over a desired duration,” said Polcawich. “

Excerpts from Developing Microrobotics for Disaster Recovery and High-Risk Environments: SHRIMP program seeks to advance the state-of-the art in micro-to-milli robotics platforms and underlying technology, OUTREACH@DARPA.MIL, July 17, 2018

The Prefect Crystal Ball for Gray War

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The activity, hostile action that falls short of–but often precedes–violence, is sometimes referred to as gray zone warfare, the ‘zone’ being a sort of liminal state in between peace and war. The actors that work in it are difficult to identify and their aims hard to predict, by design…

Dubbed COMPASS, the new program will “leverage advanced artificial intelligence technologies, game theory, and modeling and estimation to both identify stimuli that yield the most information about an adversary’s intentions, and provide decision makers high-fidelity intelligence on how to respond–-with positive and negative tradeoffs for each course of action,” according to a DARPA notice posted on March 14, 2018.

Teaching software to understand and interpret human intention — a task sometimes called “plan recognition” …has advanced as quickly as the spread of computers and the internet, because all three are intimately linked.

From Amazon to Google to Facebook, the world’s top tech companies are pouring money into probabilistic modeling of user behavior, as part of a constant race to keep from losing users to sites that can better predict what they want. A user’s every click, “like,” and even period of inactivity adds to the companies’ almost unimaginably large sets, and new machine learning and statistical techniques make it easier than ever to use the information to predict what a given user will do next on a given site.

But inferring a user’s next Amazon purchase (based on data that user has volunteered about previous choices, likes, etc.) is altogether different from predicting how an adversary intends to engage in political or unconventional warfare. So the COMPASS program seeks to use video, text, and other pieces of intelligence that are a lot harder to get than shopping-cart data…

Unlike shopping, the analytical tricks that apply to one gray-zone adversary won’t work on another. “History has shown that no two [unconventional warfare] situations or solutions are identical, thus rendering cookie-cutter responses not only meaningless but also often counterproductive,” wrote Gen. Joseph Votel, who leads U.S. Central Command, in his seminal 2016 treatise on gray zone warfare.

Exceprts from The Pentagon Wants AI To Reveal Adversaries’ True Intention, www.govexec.com, Mar. 17, 2018

The Perfect Spies: Animals as Mobile Sensors of US Enemies

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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 [marine animals] natural sensing capabilities to detect and signal when activities of interest occur in strategic waters such as straits and littoral regions.

The Persistent Aquatic Living Sensors (PALS) program, led by program manager Lori Adornato, will study natural and modified organisms to determine which ones could best support sensor systems that detect the movement of manned and unmanned underwater vehicles. PALS will investigate marine organisms’ responses to the presence of such vehicles, and characterize the resulting signals or behaviors so they can be captured, interpreted, and relayed by a network of hardware devices.

Beyond sheer ubiquity, sensor systems built around living organisms would offer a number of advantages over hardware alone. Sea life adapts and responds to its environment, and it self-replicates and self-sustains. Evolution has given marine organisms the ability to sense stimuli across domains—tactile, electrical, acoustic, magnetic, chemical, and optical. Even extreme low light is not an obstacle to organisms that have evolved to hunt and evade in the dark.

However, evaluating the sensing capabilities of sea life is only one of the challenges for PALS researchers. Performer teams supporting DARPA will also have to develop hardware, software, and algorithms to translate organism behavior into actionable information and then communicate it to end users…. The complete sensing systems must also discriminate between target vehicles and other sources of stimuli, such as debris and other marine organisms, to limit the number of false positives.

Adornato is aiming to demonstrate the approach and its advantages in realistic environments to convey military utility. “Our ideal scenario for PALS is to leverage a wide range of native marine organisms, with no need to train, house, or modify them in any way, which would open up this type of sensing to many locations,” Adornato said.

Excerpt from PALS Turns to Marine Organisms to Help Monitor Strategic Waters: Highly adapted sea life could help U.S. military detect adversary activity over large areas, Feb. 2, 2018

The Subterraneans

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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 [e.g. mass transit, water infrastructure] 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.

The DARPA Subterranean or “SubT” Challenge aims to explore new approaches to rapidly map, navigate, and search underground environments. Teams from around the world will be invited to propose novel methods for tackling time-critical scenarios through unknown courses in mapping subsurface networks and unpredictable conditions, which are too hazardous for human first responders.

“One of the main limitations facing warfighters and emergency responders in subterranean environments is a lack of situational awareness; we often don’t know what lies beneath us,” said Timothy Chung, program manager in DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office (TTO). “The DARPA Subterranean Challenge aims to provide previously unimaginable situational awareness capabilities for operations underground.”

“We’ve reached a crucial point where advances in robotics, autonomy, and even biological systems could permit us to explore and exploit underground environments that are too dangerous for humans,” said TTO Director Fred Kennedy.“Instead of avoiding caves and tunnels, we can use surrogates to map and assess their suitability for use. Through the DARPA Subterranean Challenge, we are inviting the scientific and engineering communities—as well as the public—to use their creativity and resourcefulness to come up with new technologies and concepts to make the inaccessible accessible.”

Excerpts from DARPA Subterranean Challenge Aims to Revolutionize Underground Capabilities, Dec. 21, 2017

Restitching the Internet

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Is the internet becoming obsolete?
The government agency that invented the network that runs the world seems to think so. So the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched a program aimed at “completely rethinking how to network and compute” … DARPA’s Dispersed Computing program (or DCOMP, as it’s known) adds another moniker to the set of emerging technologies that includes fog computing, edge computing, and distributed computing. DCOMP takes these paradigms one step further, however, and envisions a network that is able to borrow processing and communications resources from its many nodes as and when needed to accomplish whatever task its users might throw at it.

“Today’s network is pretty static,” says Petros Mouchtaris, CEO of Vencore Labs….“The computing capabilities we have in our hands, at what we call the edge of the network, have really changed dramatically since the internet was invented. At same time, the core technology of the internet hasn’t really changed at all.”…Updating that core technology, according to DARPA, will require overhauling the very stuff that knits the internet together: its protocols. …The TCP/IP protocols, in use since the early 1980s, are good for getting information from one place to another, but that’s no longer enough…

DCOMP envisions is “the opportunistic use of network-embedded computing resources,”… Rather than thinking of the devices on the networks as nothing more than nodes that pass information from source to destination, DCOMP sees them also as distributed computing resources that can be dynamically reallocated in real time, depending on the changing needs of the current mission set. Imagine every cell phone, smart thermostat, fitness tracker, and game console in your house contributing their spare cycles to help process the video you’re trying to upload, or educate the machine learning algorithm that runs your AI personal assistant.

To understand how and when to allocate all those devices’ computing and communications power, the network will need to be able to examine itself, to a certain extent. “We’re working on creating a network which can sense very quickly what’s going on in the network, and can react very quickly because it’s programmable,” he continues. Though the work is still in the design phase, Mouchtaris envisions a set of protocols that will change on the fly to better support current needs and conditions in the field….

“That generates a lot of overhead. You want to very quickly find out about what’s changing in the network and adapt quickly, but you don’t want to flood the network with requests for information about what’s going on.”

Excerpts from MARK WALLACE DARPA, The Secretive Agency That Invented The Internet, Is Working To Reinvent It, Fast Magazine, Nov. 7, 2017

Registrar Brain: humans in war

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Two millivolts is enough to show that someone has seen something even before he knows he has seen it himself. The two millivolts in question are those associated with P300, a fleeting electrical signal produced by a human brain which has just recognised an object it has been seeking. Crucially, this signal is detectable by electrodes in contact with a person’s scalp before he is consciously aware of having recognised anything.

That observation is of great interest to the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA’s Neurotechnology for Intelligence Analysts programme is dedicated to exploiting it in the search for things like rocket launchers and roadside bombs in drone and satellite imagery. To that end it has been paying groups of researchers to look into ways of using P300 to cut human consciousness out of the loop in such searches.

Among the beneficiaries are Robert Smith’s group at Honeywell Aerospace, in Phoenix, Arizona, and Paul Sajda’s at Neuromatters, in New York. Both of the “image triage systems” designed by these groups require the humans in them to wear special skull-enclosing caps. Each cap is fitted with 32 electrodes that record the brain’s electrical responses to whatever stimuli it is subjected to. Wearers have pictures flashed before their eyes at the rate of ten a second. That is too fast for conscious recognition, because the brain’s attention will have moved on to the next image before consciousness can come into play. It is not, though, too fast for the initial stages of recognition, marked by a P300 signal, to occur when suspicious items are present. Images that provoke such a signal are then tagged for review. According to Dr Sajda, this triples the speed with which objects of interest can be found.

Speed is important, of course. But in matters such as this, accuracy matters more. And some people think they can improve that, too—not by reading the brain, but by stimulating it. Many studies have shown that zapping the brain with a weak electric current, a procedure called transcranial neuronal stimulation, enhances what is known as “fluid intelligence”. This is the ability to reason, as opposed merely to recall facts. Another American military-research establishment, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), hopes to exploit this phenomenon for the purpose of target identification….[W]ith a current of just two milliamps, the stimulation is painless and safe, says Vincent Clark, a neuroscientist at the University of New Mexico. In a project paid for in part by IARPA, he and his team have stimulated the brains of more than 1,000 volunteers using a 9V battery connected to electrodes on the scalp. After half an hour of stimulation, volunteers spot in test photographs 13% more snipers, makeshift bombs and the like than do volunteers given a “sham” current of 100 microamps (5% of the experimental current) that mimics the skin-tingling induced by the experimental current.

Excerpts from Know your enemy: How to make soldiers’ brains better at noticing threats, Economist, July 29, 2017

Mosaic Warfare: how to fight like a network

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DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office (STO) on August 4, 2017 unveiled its updated approach to winning or deterring future conflicts. The foundation of STO’s new strategy rests on the recognition that traditional U.S. asymmetric technology advantage—such as highly advanced satellites, stealth aircraft, or precision munitions—today offer a reduced strategic value because of growing global access to comparable high-tech systems and components, many of which are now commercially available. Additionally, the high cost and sometimes decades-long development timelines for new military systems can’t compete with the fast refresh rate of electronics component technology on the commercial market, which can make new military systems obsolete before they’re delivered.

STO’s updated strategy seeks a new asymmetric advantage—one that imposes complexity on adversaries by harnessing the power of dynamic, coordinated, and highly autonomous composable systems.

“We’ve developed a technology-based vision that would enable highly complex, strategic moves by composing multiple contributing systems to enable what might be thought of as ‘mosaic warfare,’ in which individual components can respond to needs in real time to create desired outcomes,” said Tom Burns, director of STO. “The goal is to fight as a network to create a chain of effects—or, more accurately because these effects are not linear, ‘effects webs’—to deter and defeat adversaries across multiple scales of conflict intensity. This could be anything from conventional force-on-force battles to more nebulous ‘Gray Zone’ conflicts, which don’t reach the threshold of traditional military engagements but can be equally disruptive and subversive.”

U.S. military power has traditionally relied upon monolithic military systems where one type of aircraft, for example, is designed to provide a single end-to-end capability tailored to a very specific warfighting context—and be a significant loss if shot down. In contrast, the composable effects webs concept seeks a mosaic-like flexibility in designing effects for any threat scenario. By using less expensive systems brought together on demand as the conflict unfolds, these effects webs would enable diverse, agile applications—from a kinetic engagement in a remote desert setting, to multiple small strike teams operating in a bustling megacity, or an information operation to counter an adversary spreading false information in a population threatening friendly forces and strategic objectives. Mosiacs can rapidly be tailored to accommodate available resources, adapt to dynamic threats, and be resilient to losses and attrition.

This means that even if an adversary can neutralize a number of pieces of the mosaic, the collective can instantly respond as needed to still achieve the desired, overall effect.”…The mosaic strategy is also anticipated to change the way the military thinks about designing and buying future systems. Instead of spending years or even decades building exquisite, monolithic systems to rigid requirements, future acquisition programs would be able to buy mosaic “tiles” at a rapid, continuous pace. The true power of the new capabilities will come from the composite mosaic effects.

The approach will draw in part on a number of existing DARPA programs that are developing enabling technologies to achieve the challenging mosaic warfare architecture, including: The Complex Adaptive System Composition And Design Environment (CASCADE) program is addressing composition of existing and new systems; the System of Systems Integration Technology and Experimentation (SoSITE) program is focused on integrating the various systems to work together; Distributed Battle Management (DBM) and Resilient Synchronized Planning and Assessment for the Contested Environment (RSPACE) are addressing battle management command and control; and Communications in Contested Environments (C2E) and Dynamic Network Adaptation for Mission Optimization (DyNAMO) are focused on seamless, adaptable communications and networking.

Excerpts from Strategic Technology Office Outlines Vision for “Mosaic Warfare”, DARPA Press Release, Aug. 4, 2017

Unsafe Genes: DARPA

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DARPA created the Safe Genes program to gain a fundamental understanding of how gene editing technologies function; devise means to safely, responsibly, and predictably harness them for beneficial ends; and address potential health and security concerns related to their accidental or intentional misuse. Today, DARPA announced awards to seven teams that will pursue that mission, led by: The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; Harvard Medical School; Massachusetts General Hospital; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; North Carolina State University; University of California, Berkeley; and University of California, Riverside. DARPA plans to invest $65 million in Safe Genes over the next four years as these teams work to collect empirical data and develop a suite of versatile tools that can be applied independently or in combination to support bio-innovation and combat bio-threats.

Gene editing technologies …[can] selectively disable cancerous cells in the body, control populations of disease-spreading mosquitos, and defend native flora and fauna against invasive species, among other uses. The potential national security applications and implications of these technologies are equally profound, including protection of troops against infectious disease, mitigation of threats posed by irresponsible or nefarious use of biological technologies, and enhanced development of new resources derived from synthetic biology, such as novel chemicals, materials, and coatings with useful, unique properties.

Achieving such ambitious goals, however, will require more complete knowledge about how gene editors, and derivative technologies including gene drives, function at various physical and temporal scales under different environmental conditions, across multiple generations of an organism. In parallel, demonstrating the ability to precisely control gene edits, turning them on and off under certain conditions or even reversing their effects entirely, will be paramount to translation of these tools to practical applications…

Each of the seven teams will pursue one or more of three technical objectives: develop genetic constructs—biomolecular “instructions”—that provide spatial, temporal, and reversible control of genome editors in living systems; devise new drug-based countermeasures that provide prophylactic and treatment options to limit genome editing in organisms and protect genome integrity in populations of organisms; and create a capability to eliminate unwanted engineered genes from systems and restore them to genetic baseline states. Safe Genes research will not involve any releases of organisms into the environment; however, the research—performed in contained facilities—could inform potential future applications, including safe, predictable, and reversible gene drives….

A Harvard Medical School team led by Dr. George Church seeks to develop systems to safeguard genomes by detecting, preventing, and ultimately reversing mutations that may arise from exposure to radiation. This work will involve creation of novel computational and molecular tools to enable the development of precise editors that can distinguish between highly similar genetic sequences. The team also plans to screen the effectiveness of natural and synthetic drugs to inhibit gene editing activity.

A North Carolina State University (NCSU) team led by Dr. John Godwin aims to develop and test a mammalian gene drive system in rodents. The team’s genetic technique targets population-specific genetic variants found only in particular invasive communities of animals. If successful, the work will expand the tools available to manage invasive species that threaten biodiversity and human food security, and that serve as potential reservoirs of infectious diseases affecting native animal and human populations….

A University of California, Berkeley team led by Dr. Jennifer Doudna will investigate the development of novel, safe gene editing tools for use as antiviral agents in animal models, targeting the Zika and Ebola viruses. The team will also aim to identify anti-CRISPR proteins capable of inhibiting unwanted genome-editing activity, while developing novel strategies for delivery of genome editors and inhibitors….

A University of California, Riverside team led by Dr. Omar Akbari seeks to develop robust and reversible gene drive systems for control of Aedes aegypti mosquito populations.

Excerpts from Building the Safe Genes Toolkit, DARPA Press Release, July 19, 2017

Behavior Mining

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Understanding and assessing the readiness of the warfighter is complex, intrusive, done relatively infrequently, and relies heavily on self-reporting. Readiness is determined through medical intervention with the help of advanced equipment, such as electrocardiographs (EKGs) and otherspecialized medical devices that are too expensive and cumbersome to employ continuously without supervision in non-controlled environments. On the other hand, currently 92% of adults in the United States own a cell phone, which could be used as the basis for continuous, passive health and readiness assessment. The WASH program will use data collected from cellphone sensors to enable novel algorithms that conduct passive, continuous, real-time assessment of the warfighter.

DARPA’s WASH [Warfighter Analytics using Smartphones for Health] will extract physiological signals, which may be weak and noisy, that are embedded in the data obtained through existing mobile device sensors (e.g., accelerometer, screen, microphone). Such extraction and analysis, done on a continuous basis, will be used to determine current health status and identify latent or developing health disorders. WASH will develop algorithms and techniques for identifying both known indicators of physiological problems (such as disease, illness, and/or injury) and deviations from the warfighter’s micro-behaviors that could indicate such problems.

Excerpt from Warfighter Analytics using Smartphones for Health (WASH)
Solicitation Number: DARPA-SN-17-4, May, 2, 2018

Undersea War Networks: DARPA Tuna

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DARPA’s Tactical Undersea Network Architecture (TUNA) program completed its initial phase, successfully developing concepts and technologies aimed at restoring connectivity for U.S. forces when traditional tactical networks are knocked offline or otherwise unavailable. The program now enters the next phase, which calls for the demonstration of a prototype of the system at sea.

TUNA seeks to develop and demonstrate novel, optical-fiber-based technology options and designs to temporarily restore radio frequency (RF) tactical data networks in a contested environment via an undersea optical fiber backbone. The concept involves deploying RF network node buoys—dropped from aircraft or ships, for example—that would be connected via thin underwater fiber-optic cables. The very-small-diameter fiber-optic cables being developed are designed to last 30 days in the rough ocean environment—long enough to provide essential connectivity until primary methods of communications are restored.

Supplying power to floating buoy nodes on the open sea presents a particular challenge. During the first phase of the program, the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Lab (APL) developed a unique concept called the Wave Energy Buoy that Self-deploys (WEBS), which generates electricity from wave movement. The WEBS system is designed to fit into a cylinder that could be deployed from a ship or aircraft.

Excerpt from Networks of the Sea Enter Next Stage, DARPA website, Jan. 5, 2017

The Quiet Revolution in Space

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National security critically depends on space, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is focused today on creating the capabilities needed to help make that environment a real-time operational domain, DARPA Director Dr. Arati Prabhakar…

“The questions we ask ourselves at DARPA about the space domain … is what would it take to make the space domain robust for everything that we need militarily and for intelligence, and what would it take to make space a real-time operational domain, which it’s not at all today,” the director said, noting that many other nation-states now are active in orbit and space is a domain where conflict is becoming a real possibility.

Through a national security lens, she added, nothing needed from an intelligence or military perspective can be done effectively without access to space. Something as simple as navigation completely depends on GPS in nearly every part of the world and in every operating regime.

In an era of declining budgets and adversaries’ evolving capabilities, quick, affordable and routine access to space is increasingly critical for national and economic security. Today’s satellite launch systems require scheduling years in advance for a limited inventory of available slots and launches often cost hundreds of millions of dollars each. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency created its Experimental Spaceplane, or XS-1, program to help overcome these challenges and reduce the time to get capabilities to space. DARPA artist-concept graphics “Because of the demands on launch, from the day you know you have to put an asset on orbit to the time you can plan on a launch today is still unacceptably long,” Prabhakar said.

Commercial capabilities will help, she added, “but if in a time of war we imagine if we could go to space not in a month or next week but tomorrow, think about how that would completely change the calculus for an adversary that’s thinking about [using an antisatellite] weapon to take out one of our satellites

”With that ambition in mind, DARPA is now starting Phase 2 of its Experimental Spaceplane, or XS-1.“It’s a reusable first stage that’s designed to be able to put 3,000 or 5,000 pounds into low earth orbit … at a very low cost point — a few million dollars — but very significantly the objective on the DARPA program is by the end of the program to fly that spacecraft 10 times in 10 days,” Prabhakar said, “something that’s inconceivable with any of the spacecraft we have today.”

A second piece of the puzzle is what can be done in orbit, she added, referring to low earth orbit, or LEO, an orbit around Earth whose altitude is between 99 and 1,200 miles.

“We’re doing some amazing work with geo[synchronous]-robotics and rethinking [geostationary Earth orbit]-architectures once you have an asset that would allow you to extend the life or do inspection or simple repairs at GEO, which is something you can’t do today. GEO [geostationary orbit]is a stable region of space 22,370 miles from Earth. And because GEO is a stable environment for machines — but hostile for people because of high radiation levels — DARPA thinks the key technology there is space robotics. DARPA’s Phoenix program seeks to enable GEO robotics servicing and asset life extension while developing new satellite architectures to reduce the cost of space-based systems.

The program’s goal is to develop and demonstrate technologies that make it possible to inspect and robotically service cooperative space systems in GEO and to validate new satellite assembly architectures. Phoenix has validated the concept that new satellites could be built on orbit by physically aggregating “satlets” in space, according to DARPA.

Satlets are small independent modules that can attach together to create a new low-cost, modular satellite architecture, DARPA says. Satlets incorporate essential satellite functionality — power supplies, movement controls, sensors and others — and share data, power and thermal management capabilities. DARPA now is working to validate the technical concept of satlets in LEO [Low earth orbit an orbit around Earth whose altitude is between 99 and 1,200 miles.]

Excerpts from Cheryl Pellerin Director: DARPA Space Projects Critical to Shifting Trajectories , US DOD News, Nov. 22, 2016

Trapping and Killing Drones

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The rapid evolution of small unmanned air systems (sUAS) technologies fueled by the exponential growth of the commercial drone sector, has created new asymmetric threats for [conventional armies]…[There is is a need to] identify, track, and neutralize these sUASs while mitigating collateral damage.

DARPA is soliciting proposals for award for the Mobile Force Protection (MFP) program … The MFP program [seeks to develop a system] capable of defeating a raid of self-guided, small Unmanned Aircraft Systems attacking a high value asset on the move. The program …seeks to develop an integrated system capable of providing protection to ground or naval convoys against self-guided sUAS and, to the extent possible, other asymmetric threats… By focusing on protecting mobile assets, the program plans to emphasize low-footprint solutions in terms of size, weight, power (SWaP),and manning….The Mobile Force Protection program has selected the U.S. Army Maneuver Aviation and Fires Integration Application (MAFIA) as the software architecture…(www.fbo.org)

Note that In 2016 the Islamic State tried to use small commercial drones to launch attacks, prompting American commanders in Iraq to issue a warning to forces fighting the group to treat any type of small flying aircraft as a potential explosive device. (NY Times).

Mega Data to Uncover Terrorists

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DARPA is soliciting research proposals in the area of modeling adversarial activity for the purpose of producing high-confidence indications and warnings of efforts to acquire, fabricate, proliferate, and/or deploy weapons of mass terrorism (WMT)….

The goal of the Modeling Adversarial Activity (MAA) program is to develop mathematical and computational techniques for the integration and analysis of multiple sources of transaction data … Currently, transaction data is used as a means to validate leads developed from traditional sources such as Signals Intelligence (SIGINT). MAA assumes that an adversary’s WMT activities will result in observable transactions. …

MAA may draw on related domains, including human trafficking, smuggling of drugs, antiquities or rare wildlife species, and illegal arms dealing, during the creation of synthetic data sets to meet the need for a large amount and diverse types of synthetic data….

Excerpt from Broad Agency Announcement Modeling Adversarial Activity (MAA) DARPA-BAA-16-61, September 30, 2016

Space Surveillance Telescope: military use

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The most sophisticated space surveillance telescope ever developed is ready to begin tracking thousands of space objects as small as a softball. It’s a boon to space surveillance and science and a new military capability important to the nation and the globe, an Air Force general says.

Developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) is the most sophisticated instrument of its kind ever developed. It was transferred to the Air Force on Oct. 18, 2016, which has plans to operate it jointly with the Royal Australian Air Force….The Air Force will move the SST to Harold E. Holt Naval Communication Station in Western Australia, operating and maintaining the telescope jointly with the Royal Australian Air Force.The SST also will be a dedicated sensor in the U.S. Space Surveillance Network, operated by the Air Force Space Command.

SST has increased space situational awareness from a narrow view of a few large objects at a time to a widescreen view of 10,000 objects as small as softballs, DARPA says. The telescope also can search an area larger than the continental United States in seconds and survey the entire geosynchronous belt in its field of view –– a quarter of the sky –– multiple times in a night.

Excerpt Advanced Space Surveillance Telescope Has Critical Military Applications, US Department of Defense News, Oct. 22, 2016

Stop the Dirty Bomb

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A DARPA program aimed at preventing attacks involving radiological “dirty bombs” and other nuclear threats has successfully developed and demonstrated a network of smartphone-sized mobile devices that can detect the tiniest traces of radioactive materials. Combined with larger detectors along major roadways, bridges, other fixed infrastructure, and in vehicles, the new networked devices promise significantly enhanced awareness of radiation sources and greater advance warning of possible threats.

The demonstration of efficacy earlier this year was part of DARPA’s SIGMA program, launched in 2014 with the goal of creating a cost-effective, continuous radiation-monitoring network able to cover a large city or region. The demonstration was conducted at one of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey’s major transportation hubs where DARPA tested more than 100 networked SIGMA sensors…

The pocket-sized radiation “pager” sensors developed by DARPA and used in the exercise can be easily worn on a person’s belt, are one-tenth the cost of conventional sensors, and are up to 10 times faster in detecting gamma and neutron radiation. Moreover, the program achieved its price goal of 10,000 pocket-sized detectors for $400 per unit….A large-scale test deployment of more than 1,000 detectors is being planned for Washington, D.C., later this year.

Excerpt from Ushering in a New Generation of Low-Cost, Networked, Nuclear-Radiation Detectors, OUTREACH@DARPA.MIL, Aug. 23, 2016

Bio-Materials: DARPA

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Consider the benefits to be gained from a chimney that heals after damage, a roof that breathes to control airflow, surfaces that don’t flake or fade, and a driveway that eats oil to clean up after spills.–From the DARPA website

The structural materials that are currently used to construct homes, buildings, and infrastructure are expensive to produce and transport, wear out due to age and damage, and have limited ability to respond to changes in their immediate surroundings. Living biological materials—bone, skin, bark, and coral, for example—have attributes that provide advantages over the non-living materials people build with, in that they can be grown where needed, self-repair when damaged, and respond to changes in their surroundings. The inclusion of living materials in human-built environments could offer significant benefits; however, today scientists and engineers are unable to easily control the size and shape of living materials in ways that would make them useful for construction.

DARPA is launching the Engineered Living Materials (ELM) program with a goal of creating a new class of materials that combines the structural properties of traditional building materials with attributes of living systems. Living materials represent a new opportunity to leverage engineered biology to solve existing problems associated with the construction and maintenance of built environments, and to create new capabilities to craft smart infrastructure that dynamically responds to its surroundings.

“The vision of the ELM program is to grow materials on demand where they are needed,” said ELM program manager Justin Gallivan. “Imagine that instead of shipping finished materials, we can ship precursors and rapidly grow them on site using local resources. And, since the materials will be alive, they will be able to respond to changes in their environment and heal themselves in response to damage.”…

Scientists are making progress with three-dimensional printing of living tissues and organs, using scaffolding materials that sustain the long-term viability of the living cells. These cells are derived from existing natural tissues, however, and are not engineered to perform synthetic functions. And current cell-printing methods are too expensive to produce building materials at necessary scales.

ELM looks to merge the best features of these existing technologies and build on them to create hybrid materials composed of non-living scaffolds that give structure to and support the long-term viability of engineered living cells. DARPA intends to develop platform technologies that are scalable and generalizable to facilitate a quick transition from laboratory to commercial applications.

The long-term objective of the ELM program is to develop an ability to engineer structural properties directly into the genomes of biological systems so that neither scaffolds nor external development cues are needed for an organism to realize the desired shape and properties. ….

Work on ELM will be fundamental research carried out in controlled laboratory settings. DARPA does not anticipate environmental release during the program.

Excerpts from Living Structural Materials Could Open New Horizons for Engineers and Architects, DARPA seeks to develop design tools and methods for creating programmable, self-healing, living building materials, OUTREACH@DARPA.MIL, Aug. 5, 2016

An Army of Virtual Data Scientists

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Popular search engines are great at finding answers for point-of-fact questions like the elevation of Mount Everest or current movies running at local theaters. They are not, however, very good at answering what-if or predictive questions—questions that depend on multiple variables, such as “What influences the stock market?” or “What are the major drivers of environmental stability?” In many cases that shortcoming is not for lack of relevant data. Rather, what’s missing are empirical models of complex processes that influence the behavior and impact of those data elements. In a world in which scientists, policymakers and others are awash in data, the inability to construct reliable models that can deliver insights from that raw information has become an acute limitation for planners.

To free researchers from the tedium and limits of having to design their own empirical models, DARPA today launched its Data-Driven Discovery of Models (D3M) program. The goal of D3M is to help overcome the data-science expertise gap by enabling non-experts to construct complex empirical models through automation of large parts of the model-creation process. If successful, researchers using D3M tools will effectively have access to an army of “virtual data scientists.”..

“We have an urgent need to develop machine-based modeling for users with no data-science background. We believe it’s possible to automate certain aspects of data science, and specifically to have machines learn from prior example how to construct new models.”..

Some experts project deficits of 140,000 to 190,000 data scientists worldwide in 2016 alone, and increasing shortfalls in coming years. Also, because the process to build empirical models is so manual, their relative sophistication and value is often limited.

Excerpts from DARPA Goes “Meta” with Machine Learning for Machine Learning Data-Driven Discovery of Models (D3M) seeks to increase pace of scientific discovery and improve military planning, logistics and intelligence outcomes, DARPA Website, June 17, 2016

Messaging Secrecy: US Military

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The United States Department of Defense and DARPA [seek to establish] a secure messaging system that can provide repudiation or deniability, perfect forward and backward secrecy, time to live/self delete for messages, one time eyes only messages, a decentralized infrastructure to be resilient to cyber-attacks, and ease of use for individuals in less than ideal situations….The messaging platform will transfer messages via a secure decentralized protocol that will be secured across multiple channels, including but not limited to: 1) Transport protocol, 2) Encryption of messages via various application protocols, 3) Customized blockchain implementation of message deconstruction and reconstruction, and decentralized ledger implementation

Excerpts from SBIR.defense business. org

Biometrics: Behavioral and Physical

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From DARPA pdf document available at FedBizOpps. Gov Enhanced Attribution
Solicitation Number: DARPA-BAA-16-34

Malicious actors in cyberspace currently operate with little fear of being caught due to the fact that it is extremely difficult, in some cases perhaps even impossible, to reliably and confidently attribute actions in cyberspace to individuals. The reason cyber attribution is difficult stems at least in part from a lack of end-to-end accountability in the current Internet infrastructure…..The identities of malicious cyber operators are largely obstructed by the use of multiple layers of indirection… The lack of detailed information about the actions and identities of the adversary cyber operators inhibits policymaker considerations and decisions for both cyber and non-cyber response options (e.g., economic sanctions under EO-13694).

The DARPA’s Enhanced Attribution program aims to make currently opaque malicious cyber adversary actions and individual cyber operator attribution transparent by providing high-fidelity visibility into all aspects of malicious cyber operator actions and to increase the Government’s ability to publicly reveal the actions of individual malicious cyber operators without damaging sources and methods….

The program seeks to develop:

–technologies to extract behavioral and physical biometrics from a range of devices and
vantage points to consistently identify virtual personas and individual malicious cyber
operators over time and across different endpoint devices and C2 infrastructures;
–techniques to decompose the software tools and actions of malicious cyber operators into semantically rich and compressed knowledge representations;
–scalable techniques to fuse, manage, and project such ground-truth information over time,toward developing a full historical and current picture of malicious activity;

–algorithms for developing predictive behavioral profiles within the context of cyber campaigns; and
–technologies for validating and perhaps enriching this knowledge base with other sources of data, including public and commercial sources of information.

Excerpts from Enhanced Attribution, Solicitation Number: DARPA-BAA-16-34, April 22, 2016

Super Semiconductor Chips: Military

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Competition for scarce electromagnetic (EM) spectrum is increasing, driven by a growing military and civilian demand for connected devices. As the spectrum becomes more congested, the Department of Defense (DoD) will need better tools for managing the EM environment and for avoiding interference from competing signals. One recent DARPA-funded advance, an exceptionally high-speed analog-to-digital converter (ADC), represents a major step forward. The ADC could help ensure the uninterrupted operation of spectrum-dependent military capabilities, including communications and radar, in contested EM environments. The advance was enabled by 32 nm silicon-on-insulator (SOI) semiconductor technologies available through DARPA’s ongoing partnership with GlobalFoundries, a manufacturer of highly-advanced semiconductor chips.

The EM spectrum, whose component energy waves include trillionth-of-a-meter-wavelength gamma rays to multi-kilometer-wavelength radio waves, is an inherently physical phenomenon. ADCs convert physical data—that is, analog data—on the spectrum into numbers that a digital computer can analyze and manipulate, an important capability for understanding and adapting to dynamic EM environments. Today’s ADCs, however, only process data within a limited portion of the spectrum at a given time. As a result, they can temporarily overlook critical information about radar, jamming, communications, and other potentially problematic EM signals. DARPA’s Arrays at Commercial Timescales (ACT) program addressed this challenge by supporting the development of an ADC with a processing speed nearly ten times that of commercially available, state-of-the-art alternatives. By leveraging this increased speed, the resulting ADC can analyze data from across a much wider spectrum range, allowing DoD systems to better operate in congested spectrum bands and to more rapidly react to spectrum-based threats.

How fast is fast? The new ADC samples and digitizes spectrum signals at a rate of over 60 billion times per second (60 GigaSamples/sec). …The new ADC can provide a “one-stop shop” for processing radar, communications and electronic warfare signals.

Desirable as these blazing sampling speeds are, they also pose challenges. The amount of data generated is staggering, reaching nearly a terabyte per second. This high data rate requires on-chip data-management circuitry that allows signals to be processed locally on the ADC, reducing the amount of data that must be communicated to neighboring electronics. This on-board digital signal processing burns quite a bit of power and also demands state-of-the-art transistors. The 32 nm SOI technology offered by Global Foundries, the only certified DoD supplier of this circuit technology, provided ACT with the leading-edge transistors needed to sample and process the RF spectrum without exceeding power or data-transfer limitations.

Upcoming ACT designs will go further. By using GlobalFoundries’ even more advanced 14 nm technology, ACT’s next generation of ADCs aim to reduce power requirements by an additional 50 percent and enable yet smaller and lighter systems that can sample even greater swaths of the spectrum.

Excerpts from New Chips Ease Operations In Electromagnetic Environs, Jan. 11, 2016

Drones Inside Ships: Military

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Small-deck ships such as destroyers and frigates could greatly increase their effectiveness if they had their own unmanned air systems (UASs) to provide intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and other capabilities at long range around the clock. Current state-of-the-art UASs, however, lack the ability to take off and land from confined spaces in rough seas and achieve efficient long-duration flight. TERN (Tactically Exploited Reconnaissance Node) , a joint program between DARPA and the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research (ONR), seeks to provide these and other previously unattainable capabilities. As part of Tern’s ongoing progress toward that goal, DARPA has awarded Phase 3 of Tern to a team led by the Northrop Grumman Corporation…. The Tern Phase 3 design envisions a tail-sitting, flying-wing aircraft with twin counter-rotating, nose-mounted propellers. The propellers would lift the aircraft from a ship deck, orient it for horizontal flight and provide propulsion to complete a mission. They would then reorient the craft upon its return and lower it to the ship deck. The system would fit securely inside the ship when not in use.

Tern’s potentially groundbreaking capabilities have been on the Navy’s wish list in one form or another since World War II. The production of the first practical helicopters in 1942 helped the U.S. military realize the potential value of embedded vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft to protect fleets and reduce the reliance on aircraft carriers and land bases. The Tern demonstrator will bear some resemblance to the Convair XFY-1 Pogo, an experimental ship-based VTOL fighter designed by the Navy in the 1950s to provide air support for fleets. Despite numerous successful demonstrations, the XFY-1 never advanced beyond the prototype stage, in part because the Navy at the time was focusing on faster jet aircraft and determined that pilots would have needed too much training to land on moving ships in rough seas….Moving to [drones removes the need for training aircraft pilots].

Excerpt from DARPA Tern Moves Closer to Full-Scale Demonstration of Unmanned VTOL Aircraft Designed for Small Ships

Bio-Electrical Brains: Military

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DARPA has selected seven teams of researchers to begin work on the Agency’s Electrical Prescriptions (ElectRx) program, which has as its goal the development of a closed-loop system that treats diseases by modulating the activity of peripheral nerves…. Ultimately, the program envisions a complete system that can be tested in human clinical trials aimed at conditions such as chronic pain, inflammatory disease, post-traumatic stress and other illnesses that may not be responsive to traditional treatments.

“The peripheral nervous system is the body’s information superhighway, communicating a vast array of sensory and motor signals that monitor our health status and effect changes in brain and organ functions to keep us healthy,“ said Doug Weber, the ElectRx program manager and a biomedical engineer who previously worked as a researcher for the Department of Veterans Affairs. “We envision technology that can detect the onset of disease and react automatically to restore health by stimulating peripheral nerves to modulate functions in the brain, spinal cord and internal organs.”

The oldest and simplest example of this concept is the cardiac pacemaker, which uses brief pulses of electricity to stimulate the heart to beat at a healthy rate. Extending this concept to other organs like the spleen may offer new opportunities for treating inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis. Fighting inflammation may also provide new treatments for depression, which growing evidence suggests might be caused in part by excess levels of inflammatory biomolecules. Peripheral nerve stimulation may also be used to regulate production of neurochemicals that regulate learning and memory in the brain, offering new treatments for post-traumatic stress and other mental health disorders.

Circuit Therapeutics (Menlo Park, Calif.), a start-up co-founded by Karl Deisseroth and Scott Delp, is a new DARPA performer. The team plans to further develop its experimental optogenetic methods for treating neuropathic pain, building toward testing in animal models before seeking to move to clinical trials in humans.

A team at Columbia University (New York), led by Elisa Konofagou, will pursue fundamental science to support the use of non-invasive, targeted ultrasound for neuromodulation. The team aims to elucidate the underlying mechanisms that may make ultrasound an option for chronic intervention, including activation and inhibition of nerves.

A team at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health (Parkville, Australia), led by John Furness, is a first-time DARPA performer. Team members will seek to map the nerve pathways that underlie intestinal inflammation, with a focus on determining the correlations between animal models and human neural circuitry. They will also explore the use of neurostimulation technologies based on the cochlear implant —developed by Cochlear, Inc. to treat hearing loss, but adapted to modulate activity of the vagus nerve in response to biofeedback signals—as a possible treatment for inflammatory bowel disease.

A team at the Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore), led by Jiande Chen, aims to explore the root mechanisms of inflammatory bowel disease and the impact of sacral nerve stimulation on its progression. The team will apply a first-of-its-kind approach to visualize intestinal responses to neuromodulation in animal models.

A team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, Mass.), led by Polina Anikeeva, will aim to advance its established work in magnetic nanoparticles for localized, precision in vivo neuromodulation through thermal activation of neurons in animal models. The team’s work will target the adrenal gland and the splanchnic nerve circuits that govern its function. To increase specificity and minimize potential side effects of this method of stimulation, the team seeks to develop nanoparticles with the ability to bind to neuronal membranes. Dr. Anikeeva was previously a DARPA Young Faculty Awardee.

A team at Purdue University (West Lafayette, Ind.), led by Pedro Irazoqui, will leverage an existing collaboration with Cyberonics to study inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract and its responsiveness to vagal nerve stimulation through the neck. Validation of the mechanistic insights that emerge from the effort will take place in pre-clinical models in which novel neuromodulation devices will be applied to reduce inflammation in a feedback-controlled manner. Later stages of the effort could advance the design of clinical neuromodulation devices.

A team at the University of Texas, Dallas, led by Robert Rennaker and Michael Kilgard, will examine the use of vagal nerve stimulation to induce neural plasticity for the treatment of post-traumatic stress. As envisioned, stimulation could enhance learned behavioral responses that reduce fear and anxiety when presented with traumatic cues. Dr. Rennaker is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who served in Liberia, Kuwait and Yugoslavia.

“Using the peripheral nervous system as a medium for delivering therapy is largely new territory and it’s rich with potential to manage many of the conditions that impact the readiness of our military and, more generally, the health of the nation,” Weber said. “It will be an exciting path forward.”

Press Release: Work Begins to Support Self-Healing of Body and Mind
Integrated, international efforts under ElectRx program blend mapping of neural circuits and development of novel bio-electrical interfaces OUTREACH@DARPA.MIL, Oct. 5, 2015

Recyclable, Mini and Lethal: Drones

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From DARPA Website: An ability to send large numbers of small unmanned air systems (UAS) with coordinated, distributed capabilities could provide U.S. forces with improved operational flexibility at much lower cost than is possible with today’s expensive, all-in-one platforms—especially if those unmanned systems could be retrieved for reuse while airborne. So far, however, the technology to project volleys of low-cost, reusable systems over great distances and retrieve them in mid-air has remained out of reach.

To help make that technology a reality, DARPA has launched the Gremlins program….The program envisions launching groups of gremlins from large aircraft such as bombers or transport aircraft, as well as from fighters and other small, fixed-wing platforms while those planes are out of range of adversary defenses. When the gremlins complete their mission, a C-130 transport aircraft would retrieve them in the air and carry them home, where ground crews would prepare them for their next use within 24 hours….With an expected lifetime of about 20 uses, Gremlins could fill an advantageous design-and-use space between existing models of missiles and conventional aircraft…

Excerpts from Friendly “Gremlins” Could Enable Cheaper, More Effective, Distributed Air Operations, DARPA Website, Aug. 28, 2015

How to Engineer Mars to Become Earth

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Modifying a planet’s atmosphere to make it habitable for humans could be a possibility, according to the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Darpa has announced it is developing terraforming technology in a bid to recreate the conditions needed for live to thrive….[DARPA is developing]… a ‘technological toolkit’ to transform hostile places. It will involve genetically engineering a wide variety of organisms. Alicia Jackson, the deputy director of Darpa’s Biological Technologies Office in Virginia, made comments alluding to the technology at a biotech conference on June 22, 2015

‘For the first time, we have the technological toolkit to transform not just hostile places here on Earth, but to go into space not just to visit, but to stay,’ she was quoted as saying…This ‘toolkit’ will involve genetically engineering organisms of all types, of which there are up to 30 billion on Earth. On Earth, most synthetic biology projects use just two at the moment – e. coli and yeast. A newly developed software called DTA GView, dubbed the ‘Google Maps of genomes,’ will help scientists correlate information on organisms. And the ultimate goal is to choose organisms with specific genes to create something with certain characteristics.

For example, it has been theorised that some organisms could be bio-engineered to pull certain gases out of the Martian atmosphere – like carbon dioxide – and create nitrogen and oxygen. Both are abundant in Earth’s atmosphere – and would be needed for any humans hoping to breathe on Mars without a spacesuit. NASA has toyed with the idea before; last year, they unveiled the Mars Ecopoiesis Test Bed concept, which would create ecosystems capable of supporting life within biodomes on Mars. But Darpa’s technology would creative liveable environments outside in the open air on the Martian surface.

The technology has other uses, too; it could be used to repair an environment on Earth after a manmade or natural disaster, although Darpa did not specify what these could be.

Excerpts from: JONATHAN O’CALLAGHAN Could we turn Mars into Earth 2.0? Darpa is working on designer organisms to terraform the red planet, Daily Mail, June 26, 2015

Killing with Liquid Lasers: HELLADS

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A high-power laser weapon light enough to be carried by tactical aircraft has moved out of the laboratory and onto the testing ground. General Atomics Aeronautical Systems’ High-Energy Liquid Laser Defense System (HELLADS) has finished its US Government Acceptance Test Procedure and is on its way to the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico for live-fire tests.

Laser weapons have made great strides in recent years, but one of the most sought after goals has been to marry high power to light weight so the system can be installed in aircraft… patrol ships and armored combat vehicles [and drones] … [T]he all-electric HELLADS punches a 150 kW laser, yet is only a tenth the size and weight of comparable systems.

Excerpts from David Szondy, Lightweight High-Energy Liquid Laser (HELLADS) prepared for live fire tests, gizmag.com, May 30, 2015

Looking Behind the Brick Wall: Military

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From the DARPA website on project Revolutionary Enhancement of Visibility by Exploiting Active Light-fields (REVEAL) program

Imagine, for example, squad members patrolling a street in a deployed urban environment, and an armed assailant crouching behind a car or a concrete barrier. Without the benefit of different vantage points (from the air, for example), the squad could be blind to the hidden threat. If by chance a glass storefront window were behind the assailant, the squad might spot the assailant’s reflection in the window. But if the backdrop were a brick wall, there would be no visible reflection. By exploiting currently untapped aspects of light and the varied paths of photons bouncing off the brick wall, troops using hardware based on the theoretical foundations provided by REVEAL might someday be able to detect the otherwise hidden assailant [or see clearly what people are doing inside their homes].

Another potential application could be determining an unknown material’s composition and other properties from a safe distance, avoiding the potential danger associated with close proximity and physical examination. Based on information carried by the photons interacting with the material, it may be possible for troops in the future to identify radioactive, biological or chemical threats and camouflaged targets from much farther away than currently possible.

Under-sea GPS: DARPA POSYDON

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The objective of the POSYDON program is to develop an undersea system that provides omnipresent, robust positioning. DARPA envisions that the POSYDON program will distribute a small number of acoustic sources, analogous to GPS satellites, around an ocean basin. By measuring the absolute range to multiple source signals, an undersea platform can obtain continuous, accurate positioning without surfacing for a GPS fix.

DARPA program April 14, 2015

Online Anonymity Guaranteed by DARPA

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From the DARPA website—DARPA “BRANDEIS” PROGRAM AIMS TO ENSURE ONLINE PRIVACY

DARPA announced plans on March 11, 2015 to research and develop tools for online privacy, one of the most vexing problems facing the connected world as devices and data proliferate beyond a capacity to be managed responsibly. Named for former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who while a student at Harvard law school co-developed the concept of a “right to privacy”…The goal of DARPA’s newly launched Brandeis program is to enable information systems that would allow individuals, enterprises and U.S. government agencies to keep personal and/or proprietary information private.

Existing methods for protecting private information fall broadly into two categories: filtering the release of data at the source, or trusting the user of the data to provide diligent protection. Filtering data at the source, such as by removing a person’s name or identity from a data set or record, is increasingly inadequate because of improvements in algorithms that can cross-correlate redacted data with public information to re-identify the individual. According to research conducted by Dr. Latanya Sweeney at Carnegie Mellon University, birthdate, zip code and gender are sufficient to identify 87% of Americans by name.

On the other side of the equation, trusting an aggregator and other data recipients to diligently protect their store of data is also difficult. In the past few months alone, as many as 80 million social security numbers were stolen from a health insurer, terabytes of sensitive corporate data (including personnel records) were exfiltrated from a major movie studio and many personal images were illegitimately downloaded from cloud services.

“Currently, most consumers do not have effective mechanisms to protect their own data, and the people with whom we share data are often not effective at providing adequate protection’

Currently, we do not have effective mechanisms to protect data ourselves, and the people with whom we share data are often not effective at providing adequate protection.The vision of the Brandeis program is to break the tension between (a) maintaining privacy and (b) being able to tap into the huge value of data. Rather than having to balance between them, Brandeis aims to build a third option, enabling safe and predictable sharing of data in which privacy is preserved. Specifically, Brandeis will develop tools and techniques that enable us to build systems in which private data may be used only for its intended purpose and no other. The potential for impact is dramatic.

Assured data privacy can open the doors to personal medicine (leveraging cross-linked genotype/phenotype data), effective smart cities (where buildings, energy use, and traffic controls are all optimized minute by minute), detailed global data (where every car is gathering data on the environment, weather, emergency situations, etc.), and fine grained internet awareness (where every company and device shares network and cyber-attack data). Without strong privacy controls, every one of these possibilities would face systematic opposition [it should].

From the DARPA website

Like Wolves Like Drones: DARPA CODE

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Most unmanned aerial systems (UAS) [i.e. drones] require constant control by a dedicated pilot and sensor operator as well as a large number of analysts, all via telemetry. These requirements severely limit the scalability and cost-effectiveness of UAS operations and pose operational challenges in dynamic, long-distance engagements with highly mobile targets in contested electromagnetic environments. DARPA’s Collaborative Operations in Denied Environment (CODE) program aims to overcome these challenges by developing algorithms and software,,,with the goal of improving U.S. forces’ ability to conduct operations in denied or contested airspace.

CODE intends to focus in….the capability for groups of UAS to work together under a single human commander’s supervision….. CODE’s envisioned improvements to collaborative autonomy would help transform UAS operations from requiring multiple people to operate each UAS to having one person who is able to command and control six or more unmanned vehicles simultaneously. Commanders could mix and match different systems with specific capabilities that suit individual missions instead of depending on a single UAS that integrates all needed capabilities but whose loss would be potentially catastrophic.

“Just as wolves hunt in coordinated packs with minimal communication, multiple CODE-enabled unmanned aircraft would collaborate to find, track, identify and engage targets, all under the command of a single human mission supervisor,” said Jean-Charles Ledé, DARPA program manager.

Excerpts from DARPA website

Space Conquest: DARPA Phoenix

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The traditional process of designing, developing, building and deploying space systems is long and expensive. Satellites today cannot follow the terrestrial paradigm of “assemble, repair, upgrade, reuse,” and must be designed to operate without any upgrades or repairs for their entire lifespan—a methodology that drives size, complexity and ultimately cost. These difficulties apply especially to the increasing number of expensive, mission-critical satellites launched every year into geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO), approximately 22,000 miles above the Earth. Unlike objects in low Earth orbit (LEO), such as the Hubble Space Telescope, satellites in GEO are essentially unreachable with current technology.

Advanced GEO space robotics: DARPA is developing a variety of robotics technologies to address key on-orbit mission needs, including assembly, repair, asset life extension, refueling, etc., in the harsh environment of geosynchronous orbit. Development activities include the maturation of robotic arms and multiple generic and mission-specific tools. …

Satlets: A new low-cost, modular satellite architecture that can scale almost infinitely. Satlets are small independent modules (roughly 15 pounds/7 kg) that incorporate essential satellite functionality (power supplies, movement controls, sensors, etc.). Satlets share data, power and thermal management capabilities. They also physically aggregate (attach together) in different combinations that would provide capabilities to accomplish a range of diverse space missions with any type, size or shape payload. Because they are modular, they can be produced on an assembly line at low cost and integrated very quickly with different payloads. DARPA is presently focused on validating the technical concept of satlets in LEO.

Payload Orbital Delivery (POD) system: The POD is a standardized mechanism designed to safely carry a wide variety of separable mass elements to orbit—including payloads, satlets and electronics—aboard commercial communications satellites.

New Military Tanks: Ground X-Vehicle

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From the DARPA website:

For the past 100 years of mechanized warfare, protection for ground-based armored fighting vehicles and their occupants has boiled down almost exclusively to a simple equation: More armor equals more protection. Weapons’ ability to penetrate armor, however, has advanced faster than armor’s ability to withstand penetration. As a result, achieving even incremental improvements in crew survivability has required significant increases in vehicle mass and cost.,,,

DARPA has created the Ground X-Vehicle Technology (GXV-T) program to help overcome these challenges and disrupt the current trends in mechanized warfare….“GXV-T’s goal is not just to improve or replace one particular vehicle—it’s about breaking the ‘more armor’ paradigm and revolutionizing protection for all armored fighting vehicles,” said Kevin Massey, DARPA program manager. “Inspired by how X-plane programs have improved aircraft capabilities over the past 60 years, we plan to pursue groundbreaking fundamental research and development to help make future armored fighting vehicles significantly more mobile, effective, safe and affordable.”

GXV-T’s technical goals include the following improvements relative to today’s armored fighting vehicles:…

Radically Enhanced Mobility – Ability to traverse diverse off-road terrain, including slopes and various elevations; advanced suspensions and novel track/wheel configurations; extreme speed; rapid omnidirectional movement changes in three dimensions

Survivability through Agility – Autonomously avoid incoming threats without harming occupants through technologies such as agile motion (dodging) and active repositioning of armor

Crew Augmentation – Improved physical and electronically assisted situational awareness for crew and passengers; semi-autonomous driver assistance and automation of key crew functions similar to capabilities found in modern commercial airplane cockpits

Signature Management – Reduction of detectable signatures, including visible, infrared (IR), acoustic and electromagnetic (EM)

Excerpts from NEW GROUND X-VEHICLE TECHNOLOGY (GXV-T) PROGRAM AIMS TO BREAK THE “MORE ARMOR” PARADIGM FOR PROTECTION, http://www.darpa.mil, August 18, 2014

Surveillance – Undress People Remotely

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Officials from Guinness World Records today recognized DARPA’s Terahertz Electronics program for creating the fastest solid-state amplifier integrated circuit ever measured. The ten-stage common-source amplifier operates at a speed of one terahertz (1012 GHz), or one trillion cycles per second—150 billion cycles faster than the existing world record of 850 gigahertz set in 2012.…Developed by Northrop Grumman Corporation, the Terahertz Monolithic Integrated Circuit (TMIC) exhibits power gains several orders of magnitude beyond the current state of the art… For years, researchers have been looking to exploit the tremendously high-frequency band beginning above 300 gigahertz where the wavelengths are less than one millimeter. The terahertz level has proven to be somewhat elusive though due to a lack of effective means to generate, detect, process and radiate the necessary high-frequency signals. Current electronics using solid-state technologies have largely been unable to access the sub-millimeter band of the electromagnetic spectrum due to insufficient transistor performance…

According to Dev Palmer, DARPA program manager. “This breakthrough could lead to revolutionary technologies such as high-resolution security imaging systems, improved collision-avoidance radar, communications networks with many times the capacity of current systems and spectrometers that could detect potentially dangerous chemicals and explosives with much greater sensitivity.”

DARPA has made a series of strategic investments in terahertz electronics through itsHiFIVE, SWIFT and TFAST programs. Each program built on the successes of the previous one, providing the foundational research necessary for frequencies to reach the terahertz threshold.

Excerpts from DARPA CIRCUIT ACHIEVES SPEEDS OF 1 TRILLION CYCLES PER SECOND, EARNS GUINNESS WORLD RECORD, DARPA website, http://www.darpa.mil, Oct. 28, 2014

This technology can be used for Security and Communications (including military communications): Here from Wikipedia

Security:
Terahertz radiation can penetrate fabrics and plastics, so it can be used in surveillance, such as security screening, to uncover concealed weapons on a person, remotely. This is of particular interest because many materials of interest have unique spectral “fingerprints” in the terahertz range…. In January 2013, the NYPD announced plans to experiment with the newfound technology to detect concealed weapons, prompting Miami blogger and privacy activist Jonathan Corbett to file a lawsuit against the department in Manhattan federal court that same month, challenging such use: “For thousands of years, humans have used clothing to protect their modesty and have quite reasonably held the expectation of privacy for anything inside of their clothing, since no human is able to see through them.” He seeks a court order to prohibit using the technology without reasonable suspicion or probable cause.

Hypersonic Weapons

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Payloads on hypersonic aircraft, whether they are weapons or sensors, could reach their destination within minutes, rather than hours, said Mark Lewis, former chief scientist of the Air Force and now director of the Science and Technology Institute at the Institute for Defense Analyses, a federally funded research-and-development center. Hypersonic speed is generally defined as beginning at Mach 5, which is the point where aerodynamic heating caused by the speed of the vehicle cutting through the atmosphere becomes a factor.

The Air Force concluded its successful X-51 WaveRider program in 2013. The final test had the missile-like aircraft flying at Mach 5.1 for about 200 seconds. Meanwhile, the Army is testing the advanced hypersonic weapon, a missile designed for vertical launch. It suffered a failed test seconds after takeoff in August 2014, but that was caused by a faulty booster, not the missile or hypersonic technology itself, Lewis noted….

Hypersonic technology could be seen as a follow-on to stealth, Lewis said. Even if an aircraft has that kind of technology, it doesn’t mean it is invisible, he said. Adversaries are growing better at spotting stealthy aircraft, he said. Speed might compensate for that, he said. “If I can fly really fast, it makes it harder to act against me. It doesn’t make it impossible. But it makes it harder.”

Top Air Force leaders are indicating that they want to move hypersonic technology to the next level. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh and Secretary Deborah Lee James in the document “America’s Air Force: A Call to the Future,” said hypersonic development was number one on the service’s list of top five technology priorities. [T]the Air Force sees hypersonic weapons as a potential means to break through anti-access/area-denied battlefields where adversaries have robust defenses….

The Air Force will team with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency on two new hypersonic programs, he said. The first will be a cruise missile called HAWC, the hypersonic air-breathing weapons concept. The other is called tactical boost glide, which will accelerate an aircraft to Mach 5 plus speeds, then let it glide to its target.

Similarly, space planes could deliver payloads in minutes. The reusable space plane concept has been proposed many times over the years, and received a new lease on life when DARPA awarded three contracts to Boeing, Masten Space Systems and Northrop Grumman to study the idea of a two-stage launch system that could rapidly place 3,000 to 5,000 pounds into orbit. The Air Force has never given up on that idea, as evidenced by the new DARPA initiative, Lewis said. Space planes have been talked about for decades, Lewis said. There have been many starts and stops in developing the concept, he added.

NASA’s space shuttle was originally conceived as a vehicle that could rapidly lift payloads into space at low cost, and be flexible and responsive. It never lived up to that promise.

The DARPA experimental spaceplane (XS-1) program envisions a reusable aircraft that could be launched from a mobile platform, and return 10 times within 10 days. It would employ a reusable first stage that would fly to Mach 10 at a suborbital altitude. At that point, one or more expendable upper stages would separate and deploy a satellite into low-Earth orbit. While a space plane in low-Earth orbit could potentially be used as a weapon, it would more likely be employed as a means to rapidly replace satellites that have been damaged in a space war, or to place sensors over regions where there are currently no assets, Lewis said….

Meanwhile, more akin to the space shuttle than the DARPA concept for the space plane, the Air Force continues to use the X-37B, a top-secret orbiter that also glides to Earth. One has been in orbit since October 2012. The Air Force has repeatedly denied that it has, or is intended to be, weaponized. What its exact mission is remains classified

Excerpts from Stew Magnuson, Hypersonic Weapons Can Defeat Distance, National Defense Magazine, Nov. 2014

On-Demand Germs: Bioengineering for the Military

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From the DARPA website:

The development of increasingly sophisticated techniques and tools to sequence, synthesize and manipulate genetic material has led to the rapidly maturing discipline of synthetic biology. …[But] The costs of maintaining required environmental controls and detecting and compensating for genetic alterations are substantial and severely limit the widespread application of synthetic biology to U.S. national security missions.

To help address these challenges, DARPA has created the Biological Robustness in Complex Settings (BRICS) BRICS seeks to develop the fundamental understanding and component technologies needed to increase the biological robustness and stability of engineered organisms while maintaining or enhancing the safe application of those organisms in complex biological environments. The goal is to create the technical foundation for future engineered biological systems to achieve greater biomedical, industrial and strategic potential.

“By making these systems more robust, stable and safe, BRICS seeks to harness the full range of capabilities at the intersection of engineering and biology,” said Justin Gallivan, DARPA program manager. “These capabilities could include efficient on-demand bio-production of novel drugs, fuels, sensors and coatings; or engineered microbes able to optimize human health by treating or preventing disease.”

Excerpt from BUILDING THE FOUNDATION FOR FUTURE SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY APPLICATIONS WITH BRICS, July 29, 2014

Predator Bacteria for War

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The Pathogen Predators Program of DARPA would represent a significant departure from conventional antibacterial therapies that rely on small molecule antibiotics. While antibiotics have been remarkably effective in the past, their widespread use has led to the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections that are difficult or impossible to treat. In vitro studies have shown that predators such as Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus and Micavibrio aeruginosavorus can prey upon more than one hundred different human pathogens and will also prey on multi-drug resistant bacteria.

The Pathogen Predators program will answer three fundamental questions about bacterial predators:

1) Are predators toxic to recipient (host) organisms?
2) Against what pathogens (prey) are predators effective?
3) Can pathogens develop resistance to predation?

This list [of bacteria that could be killed by predator bacteria] includes NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) Category A and B threats to national security:

NIAID Category A and B
Yersinia pestis (i.e. plague)
Francisella tularensis (i.e. tularemia)
Brucella species
Coxiella burnetii (i.e. Q fever)
Rickettsia prowazekii (i.e. typhus)
Burkholderia mallei (i.e. glanders)
Burkholderia pseudomallei (i.e. melioidosis)

Source DARRA (pdf)

Manipulation of Wireless Networks -Military

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From the DARPA website and DARPA-BAA-14-44 WND Phases 2 and 3

The majority of work to develop and mature military wireless networks to date has focused on efficiency and stability in benign conditions…As the use of wireless systems expands, the likelihood of network compromise (whether maliciously or by unwitting misconfiguration) will increase. Beyond the conventional node-by-node security in use today, a set of network-based checks are needed to ensure that misinformation inserted into the control protocols does not disable the network functionality.

The Wireless Network Defense (WND) program is developing and demonstrating new technology to protect the control protocols of wireless networks from the effects of advanced attacks or other forms of compromise. The program focuses on the protocols at the network and medium access control (MAC) layers of the network stack with the goal of protecting those protocols that coordinate among the distributed devices’ management of resources such as spectrum, time, and power, and delivery of information.

The development of this technology will both improve the robustness of the class of wireless networks that are being procured and fielded in the near future, and also provide a reliable foundation on which to build the next generation of wireless systems. These new defenses will minimize the impact of attacks on network control and will force attacks to be observable and attributable in order to be effective.

Ideally…[one] should anticipate both passive listeners and active attackers; colluding attackers; dynamic attacks; and informed adversaries…[One]should assume that passive listeners and active attackers will be able to collude. That is, the threat model is a real-world adversary. Systems should be designed to mitigate attacks under all combinations of attackers and attacks…. [One]should further design mitigations and enhancements such that these mitigations and enhancements cannot themselves be leveraged by a knowledgeable adversary to attack the network.

See DARPA-BAA-14-44 WND Phases 2 and 3

VTOL-X Plane Phantom Swift

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The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is to undertake in July 2014 conceptual design reviews for the four vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) X-Plane contenders a Boeing programme official disclosed on 24 June 2014. Announced by DARPA in early 2013, the VTOL X-Plane programme is geared at demonstrating efficient hover and high-speed flight. The specific requirements are that the aircraft achieve a top sustained flight speed of 300 kt to 400 kt; raise aircraft hover efficiency from 60% to at least 75%; present a more favourable cruise lift-to-drag ratio of at least 10, up from the current 5-6; and carry a useful load of at least 40% of the vehicle’s projected gross weight of 10,000-12,000 lb (4,500-5,450 kg).

Of the four contenders, Boeing’s Phantom Swift is currently the only one to have been built (as a 17% scale model) and flown…While DARPA did not specify whether the aircraft be manned or unmanned, all of the entrants have opted for unmanned.

Excerpt from DARPA to progress VTOL X-Plane as Boeing reveals Phantom Swift details, IHS Jane’s International Defence Review, June 25, 2014

A New GPS for the Military

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Teaming up with Northrop Grumman as its primary contractor, DARPA is working today to integrate micro-electro-mechanical systems, called MEMS, and atomic inertial guidance technologies, forming a new “single inertial measurement unit” in a project designated the “Chip-Scale Combinatorial Atomic Navigator” — C-SCAN.

Translated into plain English, what C-SCAN aims to accomplish is to create a chip that performs the functions today served by orbiting GPS satellites. The chip would constantly “know” where it is in space-time, and would have this knowledge without having to ping a satellite (and maintain line-of-sight communication with a satellite) to do it… Elimination of the need to rely on satellites to determine one’s location would similarly enable the use of “GPS-like” technology for getting directions within buildings and underground — for example, in subway systems…

One of the primary vulnerabilities in today’s hi-tech, ultra-accurate weapons systems, you see, is their dependence upon GPS signals to guide them to their destinations. American “smart bombs” and guided missiles all depend greatly on GPS to know where they are, and to get where they’re going. American dominance in drone technology, similarly, depends on GPS. Problem is, while we know this is a problem, the “bad guys” know it, too — and can sometimes hack GPS signals so as to confuse, and even hijack, American weapons systems. Case in point: in 2011, Iran boasted that it had commandeered and captured a Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel — one of our most advanced “stealth” surveillance drones — in flight over Iranian territory. The Iranians didn’t have to shoot the drone down, either. Instead, they forced it to land in Iran, and captured it intact. According to Iranian engineers, this was accomplished by first jamming communications with the Sentinel’s remote controllers, then “spoofing” GPS signals, tricking the drone into landing at what it thought was its home base in Afghanistan — but what was actually an Iranian airfield.

Drones equipped with a future C-SCAN technology would be less likely to fall victim to such a trap. While their communications might be cut off, forcing them to default to autopilot and return to base, they’d at least return to the right base, because an internal chip would tell them how to get there.

Current weapons systems often include internal gyroscopes, granted, that perform some of the functions that C-SCAN aims to perfect. But as DARPA observes, present-day gyroscopes are “bulky” equipment, “expensive,” and don’t perform with the kind of accuracy that DARPA wants to see. The objective, therefore, is to explore cutting edge technologies to put gyroscope-like functionality on a chip, resulting in “small size, low power consumption, high resolution of motion detection and a fast start up time” — all loaded onto one small microchip….

Microchip-based guidance could be the solution the military is seeking to an oft-discussed problem with the nation’s newest generation of Mach 7 railguns, whose great range, speed, power — and cheapness — make them an attractive weapons system… if we can only figure a way to guide their projectiles accurately

Rich Smith, Why Is the U.S. Government Working Frantically to Get Rid of GPS?, Motley Fool, June 15, 2015

Synthetic Biology and the Military

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Twist Bioscience announced that it raised $26 million in a Series B financing to commercialize the company’s semiconductor-based synthetic gene manufacturing process. Nick and Joby Pritzker, through their family’s firm Tao Invest, led the round, with participation from ARCH Venture Partners, Paladin Capital Group, Yuri Milner and additional strategic corporate and venture investors. All existing investors participated in the round.

The company also received a $5.1 million contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to fund development of Twist’s technology platform for the large-scale, high-throughput construction of genetic designs. DARPA granted the contract under the Living Foundries: 1000 Molecules Program, which seeks to build a scalable, integrated, rapid design and prototyping infrastructure for the facile engineering of biology…

Said Emily Leproust, Ph.D., chief executive officer of Twist Bioscience. “Today, we have all the necessary components in place to automate and scale our synthetic gene manufacturing process and staff strategically, with the goal of bringing our first products and services to the market in 2015.”

According to to Twist Bioscience “At Twist Bioscience, our expertise is synthetic DNA. We have developed a proprietary semiconductor-based synthetic DNA manufacturing process featuring a 10,000-well silicon platform capable of producing synthetic biology tools, such as oligonucleotides, genes, pathways, chassis and genomes. By synthesizing DNA on silicon instead of on traditional 96-well plastic plates, our platform overcomes the current inefficiencies of synthetic DNA production, and enables cost-effective, rapid, high-quality and high throughput synthetic gene production. The Twist Bioscience platform has the potential to greatly accelerate the development of personalized medicine, sustainable chemical production, improved agriculture production as well as new applications such as in vivo diagnostics, biodetection and data storage.

Twist Bioscience Secures $31.1 Million, PRESS RELEASE, May 27, 2014

The Militarization of Deep Sea: DARPA Tuna

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Tactical Undersea Network Architectures (TUNA). Solicitation Number: DARPA-BAA-14-32, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)

DARPA is soliciting innovative research proposals in the area of undersea fiber optic-based communications networks. Proposed research should investigate innovative approaches that enable revolutionary advances in science, devices, or systems. Specifically excluded is research that primarily results in evolutionary improvements to the existing state of practice. This solicitation seeks proposals for an initial fifteen month phase (Phase 1) of the Tactical Undersea Network Architectures (TUNA) program. Performers are sought for the following Technical Areas (TAs):

TA1. System designs
TA2. Small undersea fiber optic cables
TA3. Buoy node systems.

from Federal Business Opportunities, Apr. 17, 2014

Mobile Networks on Drones

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From the DARPA Website

Missions in remote, forward operating locations often suffer from a lack of connectivity to tactical operation centers and access to valuable intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) data. The assets needed for long-range, high-bandwidth communications capabilities are often unavailable to lower echelons due to theater-wide mission priorities. DARPA’s Mobile Hotspots program aims to help overcome this challenge by developing a reliable, on-demand capability for establishing long-range, high-capacity reachback that is organic to tactical units. The program is building and demonstrating a scalable, mobile millimeter-wave communications backhaul network mounted on small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and providing a 1 Gb/s capacity. DARPA performers recently completed the first of three phases in which they developed and tested key technologies to be integrated into a complete system and flight tested in subsequent phases…

Smaller, steerable millimeter-wave antennas: During field testing, the program successfully demonstrated steerable, compact millimeter-wave antennas that rapidly acquire, track, and establish a communications link between moving platforms. Steerable millimeter-wave antennas will enable the formation of a high-capacity backhaul network between aerial and ground platforms.

Low-noise amplifiers: Performers also demonstrated an advanced low-noise amplifier (LNA), which boosts the desired communications signal while minimizing unwanted noise. The prototype achieved the record for the world’s lowest noise millimeter-wave LNA at about half the noise figure of a typical LNA.

More efficient and capable power amplifiers: Efficient millimeter-wave amplification is required to achieve the long ranges (> 50 km) desired in the Mobile Hotspots program….

New approaches for robust airborne networking: Mobile ad-hoc networking approaches were developed to maintain the high-capacity backhaul network among mobile air and ground platforms. Phase 1 performers developed unique solutions to overcome connectivity and network topology challenges associated with mobility and signal blockages due to terrain and platform shadowing.

Low-Size, Weight, and Power (SWAP) pod design to carry it all: Performers created engineering designs for small, lightweight pods to be mounted on an RQ-7 Shadow UAV. The pods, with all of the Mobile Hotspots components inside, are designed to meet the challenging program goals of widths no more than 8 inches, weight less than 20 pounds, and power consumption less than 150 watts.

Phase 2 of the program began March 2014. Two performers, L-3 Communications and FIRST RF, were chosen to lead teams comprising several Phase 1 performers…A planned third phase will encompass field testing of the Mobile Hotspot systems on networks of multiple SRQ-7 Shadow UAVs and mobile ground vehicles.

Human – Machine Interfaces

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From the DARPA website

The mission of the Biological Technologies Office (BTO) is to foster, demonstrate, and transition breakthrough fundamental research, discoveries, and applications that integrate biology, engineering, and computer science for national security. BTO seeks to establish and invest in new communities of scientific interest at the intersection of traditional and emerging disciplines. Its investment portfolio goes far beyond life sciences applications in medicine to include areas of research such as human-machine interfaces, microbes as production platforms, and deep exploration of the impact of evolving ecologies and environments on U.S. readiness and capabilities. BTO’s programs operate across a wide range of scales, from individual cells to complex biological systems including mammalian and non-mammalian organisms and the macro- and micro-environments in which they operate.

BTO Focus Areas

Restore and Maintain Warfighter Abilities Military readiness depends on the health and wellbeing of military service members. A critical part of BTO’s mission is to cultivate new discoveries that help maintain peak warfighter abilities and restore those abilities as quickly and fully as possible when they are degraded or lost. This focus area is grounded in the development of new techniques and therapeutic strategies for addressing current and emerging threats, but extends beyond medical applications to include exploration of complex biological issues that can impact an individual’s ability to operate and interact in the biological and physical world. The research portfolio includes neuroscience to drive a deeper understanding of the human brain, how it interfaces with the body and the external world, and how it directs and coordinates behavior, including decision-making in demanding environs. BTO will extend work involving human participants and apply insights from physiology, biochemistry, psychology, sociology, and related sciences to such emerging-science domains as bioengineering, bioinformatics, and microbiomics.

Harness Biological Systems The highly evolved functional and synthetic capabilities of biological systems can be harnessed to develop new products and systems in support of national security with advantages over what even the most advanced conventional chemistry and manufacturing technologies can achieve. This space and its opportunities are just becoming tangible due to the rapid, simultaneous development of genome-scale engineering tools, enormous genomic datasets, new analytical capabilities, and the convergence of several engineering and scientific disciplines with biology. BTO seeks to establish a fundamental understanding of natural processes and the underlying design rules that govern the behavior of biological systems, and apply that knowledge to forward-engineer new systems and products with novel functionality. To support this work, BTO develops techniques at the intersection of automation, computer science, and biology to explore biological data at massive scales.

Apply Biological Complexity at Scale Biological systems operate over an enormous range of spatial, physical, and temporal scales. Some organisms thrive as individual cells, while many others, including humans, are colonized by communities of foreign cells that greatly outnumber their own and have potentially significant but still largely mysterious impacts on metabolism, psychological state, performance, and health. Disease vectors migrate around the globe slowly and stealthily at times, and at other times in devastating waves of breathtaking speed—poorly understood dynamics that can threaten national security. And because they are so difficult to parse from larger biological and ecological phenomena, population-level effects of relevance to agriculture and food security remain largely unplumbed. BTO is looking into pursuing new insights derived from biological complexity and living-system dynamics with the goal of developing applications to enhance global-scale stability and human wellbeing.

See DARPA Pushes for Industrial Revolution in Genetic Engineering

Militarization of the Deep Sea

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U.S. military researchers are moving forward with a program to hide ruggedized electronic devices at the bottom of the world’s oceans that when called on will float to the surface to jam, disrupt, and spy on enemy forces. Officials of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., this week released a formal solicitation (DARPA-BAA-14-27) for the second and third phases of the Upward Falling Payloads (UFP) project to hide sensors and other devices on the ocean floor that will last for as long as five years concealed at depths to 20,000 feet.

Last summer (2013) DARPA awarded UFP phase-one contracts to Sparton Electronics of De Leon Springs, Fla., and to Zeta Associates Inc. in Fairfax, Va., to develop conceptual designs of a future system with the potential to launch sensors, electronic jammers, laser dazzlers, and other devices surreptitiously and quickly in any of the world’s maritime hot spots…

Sparton and Zeta experts designed UFP concepts that not only would float sensors to the ocean’s surface, but also potentially launch a wave of distracting light strobes, blinding lasers, electronic warfare jammers, or other kinds of non-lethal weapons able to pop up without warning in the middle of an adversary’s naval battle group.

“The goal is to support the Navy with distributed technologies anywhere, anytime over large maritime areas. If we can do this rapidly, we can get close to the areas we need to affect, or become widely distributed without delay,” says Andy Coon, the DARPA UFP program manager. “To make this work, we need to address technical challenges like extended survival of nodes under extreme ocean pressure, communications to wake-up the nodes after years of sleep, and efficient launch of payloads to the surface.”…

DARPA moves forward with project to lay sea-based electronic ambushes for enemy naval forces, Indian Defence, March 27, 2014

ARES: the New Drone

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From the DARPA website

AERIAL RECONFIGURABLE EMBEDDED SYSTEM (ARES)

DARPA unveiled the Transformer (TX) program in 2009. Transformer aimed to develop and demonstrate a prototype system that would provide flexible, terrain-independent transportation for logistics, personnel transport and tactical support missions for small ground units. In 2013, DARPA selected the Aerial Reconfigurable Embedded System (ARES) design concept to move forward. ARES is a vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) flight module designed to operate as an unmanned platform capable of transporting a variety of payloads. The ARES VTOL flight module is designed to have its own power system, fuel, digital flight controls and remote command-and-control interfaces. Twin tilting ducted fans would provide efficient hovering and landing capabilities in a compact configuration, with rapid conversion to high-speed cruise flight…

The ARES program would enable numerous benefits, including:

Useful load capability as high as 3,000 pounds, more than 40 percent of the takeoff gross weight of the aircraft

Flight performance similar to light aircraft

Compact configuration and the ability to use landing zones half the size typically needed by helicopters of similar size

VTOL operations from prepared, unprepared and ship-based landing sites

How to Search the Deep Web: DARPA MEMEX

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From the DARPA website

Today’s web searches use a centralized, one-size-fits-all approach that searches the Internet with the same set of tools for all queries. While that model has been wildly successful commercially, it does not work well for many government use cases. For example, it still remains a largely manual process that does not save sessions, requires nearly exact input with one-at-a-time entry, and doesn’t organize or aggregate results beyond a list of links. Moreover, common search practices miss information in the deep web—the parts of the web not indexed by standard commercial search engines—and ignore shared content across pages.

To help overcome these challenges, DARPA has launched the Memex program. Memex seeks to develop the next generation of search technologies and revolutionize the discovery, organization and presentation of search results. The goal is for users to be able to extend the reach of current search capabilities and quickly and thoroughly organize subsets of information based on individual interests. Memex also aims to produce search results that are more immediately useful to specific domains and tasks, and to improve the ability of military, government and commercial enterprises to find and organize mission-critical publically available information on the Internet…

Initially, DARPA intends to develop Memex to address a key Defense Department mission: fighting human trafficking. Human trafficking is a factor in many types of military, law enforcement and intelligence investigations and has a significant web presence to attract customers. The use of forums, chats, advertisements, job postings, hidden services, etc., continues to enable a growing industry of modern slavery. An index curated for the counter-trafficking domain, along with configurable interfaces for search and analysis, would enable new opportunities to uncover and defeat trafficking enterprises.

The Memex program gets its name and inspiration from a hypothetical device described in “As We May Think,” a 1945 article for The Atlantic Monthly written by Vannevar Bush, director of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) during World War II. Envisioned as an analog computer to supplement human memory, the memex (a combination of “memory” and “index”) would store and automatically cross-reference all of the user’s books, records and other information.

Excerpt, MEMEX AIMS TO CREATE A NEW PARADIGM FOR DOMAIN-SPECIFIC SEARCH, DARPA Website, February 9, 2014

Vanishing Electronics: Military

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What are VANISHING PROGRAMMABLE RESOURCES (VAPR)? From the DARPA website

What if these electronics simply disappeared when no longer needed? DARPA announces the Vanishing Programmable Resources (VAPR) program with the aim of revolutionizing the state of the art in transient electronics or electronics capable of dissolving into the environment around them. Transient electronics developed under VAPR should maintain the current functionality and ruggedness of conventional electronics, but, when triggered, be able to degrade partially or completely into their surroundings. Once triggered to dissolve, these electronics would be useless to any enemy who might come across them.

The Vanishing Programmable Resources (VAPR) program seeks electronic systems capable of physically disappearing in a controlled, triggerable manner. These transient electronics should have performance comparable to commercial-off-the-shelf electronics, but with limited device persistence that can be programmed, adjusted in real-time, triggered, and/or be sensitive to the deployment environment. VAPR seeks to enable transient electronics as a deployable technology. To achieve this goal, researchers are pursuing new concepts and capabilities to enable the materials, components, integration, and manufacturing that will realize this new class of electronics.

Transient electronics may enable a number of revolutionary military capabilities including sensors for conventional indoor/outdoor environments, environmental monitoring over large areas, and simplified diagnosis, treatment, and health monitoring in the field. Large-area distributed networks of sensors that can decompose in the natural environment (ecoresorbable) may provide critical data for a specified duration, but no longer. Alternatively, devices that resorb into the body (bioresorbable) may aid in continuous health monitoring and treatment in the field.

Companies involved IBM: IBM plans is to utilize the property of strained glass substrates to shatter as the driving force to reduce attached CMOS chips into Si and SiO2 powder.

BAE Systems

Undersea Drones: DARPA Hydra

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DAPRA’s Hydra Program from Federal Business Opportunities

The Hydra program will develop and demonstrate an unmanned undersea system, providing a novel delivery mechanism for insertion of unmanned air and underwater vehicles into operational environments. Situated underwater, Hydra will use modular payloads within a standardized enclosure to enable scalable, cost-effective deployment of rapid response assets and will integrate existing and emerging technologies in new ways to create an alternate means of delivering a variety of payloads close to the point of use. The Hydra program seeks to develop and demonstrate initial examples of air and undersea payloads while leaving open the potential for accommodating additional payloads in the future.

The rising number of ungoverned states, piracy, and proliferation of sophisticated defenses severely stretches current resources and impacts the nation’s ability to conduct special operations and contingency missions. The Hydra program represents a cost effective way to add undersea capacity that can be tailored to support each mission. Hydra’s communications suite could allow synergistic function with manned platforms, thus increasing their effectiveness, or could allow remote control from over-the-horizon. Technologies are intended to be adaptable to multiple delivery options, including airborne, surface, and subsurface. The Hydra program will enable other new capabilities not currently performed from undersea.

Hydra: Solicitation Number: DARPA-BAA-13-39, Agency: Other Defense Agencies, Office: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

GPS Jammers and Spoofers

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GPS jammers are cheap: a driver can buy a dashboard model for about £50 ($78). They are a growing menace. The bubbles of electromagnetic noise they create interfere with legitimate GPS users. They can disrupt civil aviation and kill mobile-phone signals, too. In America their sale and use is banned. In Britain they are illegal for civilians to use deliberately, but not, yet, to buy: Ofcom, a regulator, is mulling a ban. In recent years Australian officials have destroyed hundreds of jammers.

In the right (or wrong) hands, they are potential weapons. Britain’s armed services test the devices in the Brecon Beacons in Wales, a military training area. North Korea uses big lorry-mounted versions to block GPS signals in South Korea. Starting with a four-day burst in August 2010, the attacks, which come from three positions inside the North, have lengthened. In early 2012 they ran for 16 days, causing 1,016 aircraft and 254 ships to report disruption…Criminals or terrorists could knock out GPS for an entire city or shipping lane anywhere in a flash. Even without North Korean-sized contraptions, the jamming can be substantial. Suitcase-sized devices on sale on the internet claim a range of 300-1,000 metres.

Malfunctioning satellites and natural interference from solar activity have hit GPS signals and sent ships off course. David Last, a navigation expert, says an accidental power cut, perhaps caused by a jammer taken on board a car ferry, could cause a shipwreck. Generating a false signal—spoofing—is another threat. In December 2011 Iran said it had spoofed an American drone before capturing it (most experts dismiss the claim). So far effective spoofing seems confined to laboratories, but Mr Last says some governments are already taking countermeasures.

One solution is a different means of navigation. In April South Korea announced plans for a network of 43 eLoran (enhanced long-range navigation) ground-based radio towers, based on technology first used in the second world war. It uses a far stronger signal than GPS, and should give pilots and ships’ captains a safer alternative by 2016. With Chinese and Russian help, South Korea hopes to expand coverage across the region. Britain’s General Lighthouse Authorities (GLA) are following suit with seven new eLoran stations. Martin Bransby, an engineer with the GLA, says this will replace visual navigation as the main backup for GPS. It will be working by mid-2014, and cost less than £700,000; receivers cost £2,000 per vessel. By 2019 coverage should reach all big British ports.

America’s military-research agency DARPA has an experimental “single-chip timing and inertial measurement unit” (TIMU). When finished, according to the project’s boss, Andrei Shkel, it will use tiny gyroscopes and accelerometers to track its position without using satellites or radio towers. America’s White Sands missile range in New Mexico is installing a “Non-GPS Based Positioning System”, using ground-based antennae to provide centimetre-level positioning over 2,500 square miles. In May the Canadian government said it would splash out on anti-jam upgrades for military aircraft.

A new version of the US air force’s bunker-busting bomb, designed in part to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities, includes technology to prevent defenders from blocking its satellite-based guidance systems. MBDA, a European missile firm, is working on similar lines.

But for many users, GPS and other space-based navigation systems—which include Russia’s GLONASS, China’s partly complete Beidou, and an as-yet unfinished project by the European Union—remain indispensable and ubiquitous. They are also vulnerable. For those whose lives or livelihoods depend on knowing where they are, more resilient substitutes cannot come fast enough.

GPS jamming: Out of sight, Economist, July 27, 2013, at 51

Digital Bombs: Plan X

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The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency DARPA has chosen six companies so far to define ways of understanding, planning, and managing military cyber warfare operations in real-time, large-scale, and dynamic networks. DARPA has awarded six contracts collectively worth nearly $74 million for the Foundational Cyberwarfare (Plan X) project to conduct research into the nature of cyber warfare, and to develop strategies to seize and maintain U.S. cyber security and cyber attack dominance.

The contracts awarded are to Data Tactics, Intific, Raytheon SI Government Solutions, Aptima, Apogee Research, and the Northrop Grumman…

Today’s understanding of the cyber domain poses integration challenges with existing military capabilities, and connects computers using traceroute, packet analysis, and other techniques. In fact, current research is just beginning to answer questions about the cyber domain, DARPA officials say.

The Plan X program contractors will define a cyber battlespace as three main concepts: network map, operational units, and capability set. The network map is a collection of nodes and edges, and shows how computers are connected; the network map is where military planners and operators interact. Operational units are platforms such as ships, aircraft, and armored combat vehicles that are part of the network topology. There are two primary types of operational units: entry nodes and support platforms. An entry node gives direct physical access into a network, while support platforms control different aspects of an operation — similarly to how military fighters, bombers, and unmanned aircraft control different aspects of air campaigns.

The capability set involves technologies the military uses to control the cyber battlespace, and are divided into three categories: access, functional, and communication. Access enables a user to run programs or payloads. Functional involves other types of technology that affect computers and networks, such as network scanners, denial-of-service, defense evasion, network and host reconnaissance, and operating system control. Communication helps entry nodes, support platforms, and system capabilities to exchange information.

The Plan X program seeks to integrate the cyber battlespace concepts of the network map, operational unit, and capability set in military cyber operations, and will be developed as an open platform architecture for integration with government and industry technologies.

The Plan X program is structured around an on-site collaborative research space (CRS) in Arlington, Va., where the program contractors will be organized as a virtual technology startup. Several contract awards are expected, and the program will run in four one-year phases.

Excerpt, John Keller, DARPA picks six companies to define enabling technologies for U.S. cyber warfare strategy, Military and Aerospace, July 11, 2013

Keep Talking, the State Listens

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DARPA is funding a project that uses crowdsourcing to improve how machines analyze our speech. Even more radical: DARPA wants to make systems so accurate, you’ll be able to easily record, transcribe and recall all the conversations you ever have... But it’s not just about better recordings of what you say. It’ll lead to more recorded conversations, quickly transcribed and then stored in perpetuity — like a Twitter feed or e-mail archive for everyday speech. Imagine living in a world where every errant utterance you make is preserved forever.

University of Texas computer scientist Matt Lease… has attracted enough attention for Darpa to award him a $300,000 award over two years to study the new project, called “Blending Crowdsourcing with Automation for Fast, Cheap, and Accurate Analysis of Spontaneous Speech.” The project envisions a world that is both radically transparent and a little freaky.

The idea is that business meetings or even conversations with your friends and family could be stored in archives and easily searched. The stored recordings could be held in servers, owned either by individuals or their employers….

How? The answer, Lease says, is in widespread use of recording technologies like smartphones, cameras and audio recorders — a kind of “democratizing force of everyday people recording and sharing their daily lives and experiences through their conversations.” But the trick to making the concept functional and searchable, says Lease, is blending automated voice analysis machines with large numbers of human analysts through crowdsourcing. That could be through involving people “strategically,” to clean up transcripts where machines made a mistake. Darpa’s older EARS project relied entirely on automation, which has its drawbacks….

Crowdsourcing is all about harnessing distributed networks of people — crowds — to do tasks better and more efficiently than individuals or machines. Recently, that’s meant harnessing large numbers of people to build digital maps, raising funds for a film project at Kickstarter, or doing odd-jobs at Amazon Mechanical Turk — one system being studied as part of the project. Darpa has also taken an interest in crowdsourcing as a way to analyze vast volumes of intelligence data, and Darpa’s sibling in the intelligence community, IARPA, has researched crowdsourcing as a way to find the best intelligence predictions.

It also raises some thorny legal and social questions about privacy. For one, there is an issue with “respecting the privacy rights of multiple people involved,” Lease says. One solution, for a business conference that’s storing and transcribing everything said by the participants, could be a mutual agreement between all parties. He adds that technical issues when it comes to archiving recorded speech are still open questions, but people could potentially hold their cell phone conversations on remote servers; or on individual, privately-held servers.

The other problem is figuring out how to search massive amounts of transcribed speech, like how search engines such as Google use complex algorithms to match and optimize search queries with results that are likely to be relevant. Fast and cheap web analytics — judging what people type and matching it up to what they click — is one way to do it. Studying focus groups are more precise, but expensive. A third way, Lease suggests, is using more crowdsourcing as a sort of a “middle-ground” between the two methods.

But it’s unknown how the research will be applied to the military. Lease wouldn’t speculate, and it’s still very much a basic research project. Though if it’s similar to EARS at all, then it may not be too difficult to figure out. A 2003 memorandum from the Congressional Research Service described EARS as focusing on speech picked up from broadcasts and telephone conversations, “as well as extract clues about the identity of speakers” for “the military, intelligence and law enforcement communities.” Though Lease didn’t mention automatically recognizing voices. But the research may not have to go that far — if we’re going to be recording ourselves.

Excerpt, BY ROBERT BECKHUSEN, Darpa Wants You to Transcribe, and Instantly Recall, All of Your Conversations, Wired, Mar. 4, 2013

The Super Military Helicopter: VTOL-X

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From the DARPA website:

The versatility of helicopters and other vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft make them ideal for a host of military operations. Currently, only helicopters can maneuver in tight areas, land in unprepared areas, move in all directions, and hover in midair while holding a position. This versatility often VTOL aircraft the right aerial platform for transporting troops, surveillance operations, special operations and search-and-rescue missions.

Compared to fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters are slower-leaving them more vulnerable to damage from enemy weapons. Special operations that rely on lightning-quick strikes and medical units that transport patients to care facilities need enhanced speed to shorten mission times, increase mission range, reduce the number of refueling events and, most important, reduce exposure to the adversary.

By their very design, rotary-wing aircraft that take off and land vertically have a disadvantage achieving speeds comparable to fixed-wing aircraft.,,,”For the past 50 years, we have seen jets go higher and faster while VTOL aircraft speeds have flat-lined and designs have become increasingly complex,” said Ashish Bagai, DARPA program manager. “To overcome this problem, DARPA has launched the VTOL X-Plane program to challenge industry and innovative engineers to concurrently push the envelope in four areas: speed, hover efficiency, cruise efficiency and useful load capacity.” “We have not made this easy,” he continued. “Strapping rockets onto the back of a helicopter is not the type of approach we’re looking for…This time, rather than tweaking past designs, we are looking for true cross-pollinations of designs and technologies from the fixed-wing and rotary-wing worlds.

Excerpt from DARPA EXPERIMENTAL AIRCRAFT PROGRAM TO DEVELOP THE NEXT GENERATION OF VERTICAL FLIGHT, February 25, 2013

What is the High Energy Liquid Laser?

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Enemy surface-to-air threats to manned and unmanned aircraft have become increasingly sophisticated, creating a need for rapid and effective response to this growing category of threats. High power lasers can provide a solution to this challenge, as they harness the speed and power of light to counter multiple threats. Laser weapon systems provide additional capability for offensive missions as well—adding precise targeting with low probability of collateral damage. For consideration as a weapon system on today’s air assets though, these laser weapon systems must be lighter and more compact than the state-of-the-art has produced.

The goal of the High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System (HELLADS) program is to develop a 150 kilowatt (kW) laser weapon system that is ten times smaller and lighter than current lasers of similar power, enabling integration onto tactical aircraft to defend against and defeat ground threats. With a weight goal of less than five kilograms per kilowatt, and volume of three cubic meters for the laser system, HELLADS seeks to enable high-energy lasers to be integrated onto tactical aircraft, significantly increasing engagement ranges compared to ground-based systems.

The program has completed laboratory testing of a fundamental building block for HELLADS, a single laser module that successfully demonstrated the ability to achieve high power and beam quality from a significantly lighter and smaller laser. The program is now in the final development phase where a second laser module will be built and combined with the first module to generate 150 kW of power.

The plan is for the laser to be transported to White Sands Missile Range for ground testing against rockets, mortars, surface-to-air missiles and to conduct simulated air-to-ground offensive missions.

High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System (HELLADS)

Just Hit See-Me: the new military satellites

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The Seeme Program from DARPA website:

DARPA’s SeeMe (Space Enabled Effects for Military Engagements) program aims to give mobile individual US warfighters access to on-demand, space-based tactical information in remote and beyond- line-of-sight conditions. If successful, SeeMe will provide small squads and individual teams the ability to receive timely imagery of their specific overseas location directly from a small satellite with the press of a button — something that’s currently not possible from military or commercial satellites.

The program seeks to develop a constellation of small “disposable” satellites, at a fraction of the cost of airborne systems, enabling deployed warfighters overseas to hit ‘see me’ on existing handheld devices to receive a satellite image of their precise location within 90 minutes. DARPA plans SeeMe to be an adjunct to unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology, which provides local and regional very-high resolution coverage but cannot cover extended areas without frequent refueling. SeeMe aims to support warfighters in multiple deployed overseas locations simultaneously with no logistics or maintenance costs beyond the warfighters’ handheld devices.

The SeeMe constellation may consist of some two-dozen satellites, each lasting 60-90 days in a very low-earth orbit before de-orbiting and completely burning up, leaving no space debris and causing no re-entry hazard. The program may leverage DARPA’s Airborne Launch Assist Space Access (ALASA) program, which is developing an aircraft-based satellite launch platform for payloads on the order of 100 lbs. ALASA seeks to provide low-cost, rapid launch of small satellites into any required orbit, a capability not possible today from fixed ground launch sites.

Raytheon Company was awarded a $1.5 million Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) contract for phase one of the agency’s Space Enabled Effects for Military Engagements (SeeMe) program. During the next nine months, the company will complete the design for small satellites to enhance warfighter situational awareness in the battlespace. Raython News Release, Dec. 13, 2012

How to Command the Deep Sea: deep sea capsules of DARPA

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Distributed systems to hibernate in deep-sea capsules for years, wake up when commanded, and deploy to surface providing operational support and situational awareness.

Today, cost and complexity limit the Navy to fewer weapons systems and platforms, so resources are strained to operate over vast maritime areas. Unmanned systems and sensors are commonly envisioned to fill coverage gaps and deliver action at a distance. However, for all of the advances in sensing, autonomy, and unmanned platforms in recent years, the usefulness of such technology becomes academic when faced with the question, “How do you get the systems there?” DARPA’s Upward Falling Payloads program seeks to address that challenge.

The UFP concept centers on developing deployable, unmanned, distributed systems that lie on the deep-ocean floor in special containers for years at a time. These deep-sea nodes would then be woken up remotely when needed and recalled to the surface. In other words, they “fall upward.”

“The goal is to support the Navy with distributed technologies anywhere, anytime over large maritime areas. If we can do this rapidly, we can get close to the areas we need to affect, or become widely distributed without delay,” said Andy Coon, DARPA program manager. “To make this work, we need to address technical challenges like extended survival of nodes under extreme ocean pressure, communications to wake-up the nodes after years of sleep, and efficient launch of payloads to the surface.”

Source DARPA, Jan. 11, 2013

DARPA will host a Proposers’ Day Conference for the Upward Falling Payload (UFP) program on Friday, January 25, 2012 in Arlington, VA at the DARPA Conference Center, in support of the Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) DARPA-BAA-13-17

Cost and complexity limit the number of ships and weapon systems the Navy can support in forward operating areas. This concentration of force structure is magnified as areas of contested environments grow. A natural response is to develop lower-cost unmanned and distributed systems that can deliver effects and situation awareness at a distance. However, power and logistics to deliver these systems over vast ocean areas limit their utility. The Upward Falling Payload (UFP) program intends to overcome these barriers. The objective of the UFP program is to realize a new approach for enabling forward deployed unmanned distributed systems that can provide non-lethal effects or situation awareness over large maritime areas. The approach centers on pre-deploying deep-ocean nodes years in advance in forward areas which can be commanded from standoff to launch to the surface. The UFP system is envisioned to consist of three key subsystems: (1) The ‘payload’ which executes waterborne or airborne applications after being deployed to the surface, (2) The UFP ‘riser’ which provides pressure tolerant encapsulation and launch (ascent) of the payload, and (3) The UFP communications which triggers the UFP riser to launch. A multi-phase effort is envisioned to design, develop, and demonstrate UFP systems.

Source: Federal Business Opportunities

Beyond GPS: All Source Positioning and Navigation

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DARPA’s All Source Positioning and Navigation (ASPN) program seeks to enable low cost, robust, and seamless navigation solutions for military users on any operational platform and in any environment, with or without GPS. In particular, ASPN will develop the architectures, abstraction methods, and navigation filtering algorithms needed for rapid integration and reconfiguration of any combination of sensors. This will enable rapid adaptation to evolving missions as well as reduction of the system integration costs and time-to-market for navigation solutions in general.

The goal of Phase 2 of ASPEN is to address the issues of optimization and real-time operation, showing capabilities beyond basic plug-and-play flexibility. Solutions must be capable of adapting to a diverse set of sensor and IMU inputs and selectively choosing the subset of measurements that produces the best possible solution, ideally mirroring the result from a tuned filter solution for that same scenario….Phase 2 solutions will need to demonstrate real-time operation in representative field (non-laboratory) environments. Although adaptability is the main goal of the ASPN program, the possibility of ASPN accuracy being substantially better than current state of art should be considered, given accommodation by ASPN of larger and more diverse sensor suites, ease of optimizing ASPN to immediate applications, and potential synergistic benefits of an open architecture.

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