By carrying a more accurate rifle scope, U.S. warfighters can increase their standoff distance when engaging enemies. Increased standoff distance can help protect warfighter lives. This is especially true when an infrared scope is needed for nighttime action. Technologies exist for cooled infrared imaging at greater distances, but such imaging systems are limited by size, weight and power (SWaP) to large platforms such as tanks or helicopters.

 

Providing high-bandwidth communications for troops in remote forward operating locations is not only critical but also challenging because a reliable infrastructure optimized for remote geographic areas does not exist. When you introduce additional needs, such as communication support for data feeds from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) transmitting information to troops on patrol in remote areas, you face a host of new challenges where dropped signals can create a serious threat to a warfighter's situational awareness.

 

Dropped calls are an annoyance in a major metropolitan area. But when you’re conducting military patrols in a remote forward-operating location, a loss of data signal means no connectivity between you, reachback support, firepower and valuable intelligence.  DARPA’s Fixed Wireless at a Distance program seeks to enable pervasive, high-throughput military communications using a mobility backbone infrastructure that provides unlimited scalability for high-speed communication for warfighters.

 

Today’s dismounted warfighter can be saddled with more than 100 pounds of gear, resulting in physical strain, fatigue and degraded performance. Reducing the load on dismounted warfighters has become a major point of emphasis for defense research and development, because the increasing weight of individual equipment has a negative impact on warfighter readiness. The Army has identified physical overburden as one of its top five science and technology challenges. To help alleviate physical weight on troops, DARPA is developing a highly mobile, semi-autonomous legged robot, the Legged Squad Support System (LS3), to integrate with a squad of Marines or Soldiers.

 

Computers are constrained by physical limits, as well as the requirement for humans to program how computers interact with their environments.  In contrast the human brain autonomously processes information and learns from its environment.  If available, neuromorphic electronic machines, computers that function more like a brain, may enable autonomous computational solutions for real-world problems with many complex variables. 

 

Embedded computer systems play a part in every aspect of DoD technology. The software in these systems does everything from managing large physical infrastructures, to running peripherals such as printers and routers, to controlling medical devices such as pacemakers and insulin pumps. Networking these embedded computer systems enables remote retrieval of diagnostic information, permits software updates, and provides access to innovative features, but it also introduces vulnerabilities to the system via remote attack.

 

Currently being developed by DARPA researchers at Washington-based Innovega iOptiks are contact lenses that enhance normal vision by allowing a wearer to view virtual and augmented reality images without the need for bulky apparatus.  Instead of oversized virtual reality helmets, digital images are projected onto tiny full-color displays that are very near the eye.  These novel contact lenses allow users to focus simultaneously on objects that are close up and far away.  This could improve ability to use tiny portable displays while sill interacting with the surrounding environment.

 

Computational capability is an enabler for nearly every military system.  But computational capability is increasingly limited by power requirements and the constraints on the ability to dissipate heat.  One particular military computational need is found in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems where sensors collect more information than can be processed in real time.  To continue to increase processing speed, new methods for controlling power constraints are required.

 

Proteins are essential in almost all biological processes. The three-dimensional shape of the protein, which is essential to its function, is determined by protein folding. Foldit, which was initially funded by DARPA, is a game with an online community of 240,000 players that allows non-experts and experts alike to collaborate and solve protein folding puzzles. Solutions to these puzzles are sent to biochemistry researchers to analyze for advances in protein design prediction.

 

TIME Magazine highlighted a DARPA-developed fire-suppression technology naming it among the 50 best inventions of 2011. Fire in a combat vehicle, aboard a ship or other confined space such as an airplane cockpit puts warfighters at risk. Today’s fire suppression technologies are many decades old and focus largely on disrupting the chemical reactions involved in combustion by spraying water, foams or other chemicals on the flames. The key to transformative firefighting approaches may lie in the fundamentals of fire itself.

 

Military satellites are critical sources of communications and data for today’s operations environments. Through DARPA’s Phoenix program, useable antennas or solar arrays from retired satellites in geosynchronous orbit (GEO – 36,000 kilometers above earth) could be removed and potentially repurposed as components for new satellites to provide vital mission support. However, identifying cooperating satellites from which to harvest an array is a difficult and lengthy task using current ground-based satellite imaging techniques. By introducing precise fiber optic controls to ground-based telescopes, this challenge may be overcome. DARPA’s Galileo program seeks to bridge the precision fiber optic controls and long-baseline astronomical interferometry technical communities to enable imaging of objects in GEO faster than is possible today.

 

Military missions place tremendous stress on the materials used for defense weapons, vehicles and other applications. As a result, the search for stronger, lighter and more resilient materials is never ending. Some materials have proven to have high pressure phases that could yield performance improvements in a variety of defense applications provided the processes could be scaled to create stable materials in the quantities needed for the defense mission. Applications range from stronger armor, to performance enhancement in propulsion, to greater resiliency in aerospace, ground and naval platforms. DARPA’s Extended Solids program seeks to identify processes that enable stabilization and production of high pressure phase materials, without the limitations of scale introduced by current high-pressure processes, that exhibit properties far superior to those currently available for DoD applications.

 

Multiple scenarios exist where warfighters may be exposed to high levels of radiation. Countermeasures against possible high doses of radiation are an ongoing high priority for Department of Defense research and development organizations.

 

The use of chemical agents by enemy forces or terrorists poses a threat to U.S. troops and civilian populations. New countermeasures against nerve agents remain a high priority research and development focus for the Department of Defense. Human butyrylcholinesterase, a bioscavenger that binds nerve agent in the blood stream before it can affect the nervous system, has emerged as a potential new approach to reduce toxicity of chemical warfare nerve agents. A biological scavenger should have little or no behavioral or physiological side effects, which is an improvement over currently available treatments. Results of preliminary research support recombinant butyrylcholinesterase as a possible next generation of pharmaceuticals to protect warfighters against nerve agent poisoning.

 

Securing research funding can be a challenge for tenure-track faculty with cutting-edge ideas but few connections. Those ideas may be the breakthroughs needed to advance critical science and technologies in support of the Defense mission. For the sixth year, DARPA will invest in the next generation of rising academic stars through its Young Faculty Award (YFA) Research Announcement.

 

Current sensor systems, like those being developed for DARPA’s Adaptable Sensor System (ADAPT) program, are increasingly complex; they offer advances in capabilities far beyond their current use. One significant limiting factor in our ability to leverage all of these advances is the lack of sophisticated, adaptive applications. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), for example, have become indispensible intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) platforms on today’s battlefield. How much more effective could they be if an app were created that allowed a swarm of small deployed UAVs to be controlled as a single unit (a hive so to speak) without having to individually control each vehicle?

 

Almost 9,000 teams registered to participate in DARPA's Shredder Challenge. Thirty-three days after the challenge was announced, one small San Francisco-based team correctly reconstructed each of the five challenge documents and solved their associated puzzles. The ‘All Your Shreds Are Belong to U.S.’ team, which won the $50,000 prize, used custom-coded, computer-vision algorithms to suggest fragment pairings to human assemblers for verification. In total, the winning team spent nearly 600 man-hours developing algorithms and piecing together documents that were shredded into more than 10,000 pieces.

 

Rapidly flapping wings to hover, dive, climb, or dart through an open doorway, DARPA’s remotely controlled Nano Air Vehicle relays real-time video from a tiny on-board camera back to its operator. Weighing less than a AA battery and resembling a live hummingbird, the vehicle could give war fighters an unobtrusive view of threats inside or outside a building from a safe distance.  This week, TIME Magazine named the Hummingbird one of the best 50 inventions of the year, featuring it on the November 28^th cover.

 

Military teams have gathered around mission planning sand tables for centuries, but in the future they may have a more realistic and interactive simulation tool. DARPA’s Urban Photonic Sandtable Display (UPSD) pioneers an advanced 3-D technology that creates a real-time, color, 360-degree, 3-D holographic display that could assist battle planners. TIME Magazine honored the UPSD and DARPA’s Nano Air Vehicle Hummingbird, a robotic air vehicle that looks and flies like a Hummingbird, as two of the best 50 inventions of the year.

 

Formal program verification is a proven method for reducing defects in software and proving that software has specified properties, but formal verification does not currently scale to the size of software found in modern weapon systems. Moreover, formal verification is currently performed by highly specialized researchers with deep knowledge of software technology and mathematical theorem-proving techniques. Because of these constraints and the resulting high costs, formal verification is not widely practiced, an issue of particular concern for the Department of Defense.

 

With only 13 days left in the DARPA Shredder Challenge, the final puzzle remains unsolved. With over 8,200 registered participants and 72,000 puzzle downloads, participation is high but no team has yet been able to put together the right combination of automation, collaboration and persistence to piece together the fifth shredded document.

 

 

Small, wirelessly-networked, energy efficient systems with sophisticated security policies and powerful processors are commonplace in today’s world. They are not, however, state of the art in space.  Yet these same ground-based system capabilities are needed to provide the connectivity required by DARPA’s System F6 program.

 

 

Nearly 700 experts from the cyber community—half of which were new to the DARPA cyber community—joined Agency and other Defense Department cyber leaders in Arlington, Va. at DARPA’s “Colloquium on Future Directions in Cyber Security,” Monday. A general agreement by all attendees was rapidly reached; changing how we deal with defense of the nation’s cyber assets is critical to national security moving forward. “New capabilities are needed… We need more and better options.” said DARPA Director, Regina E. Dugan.

 

Today there’s one way to get a satellite into space: launch it from the ground on a booster rocket, which is expensive and can take weeks or months between missions to prepare the launch pad. And a change in weather can scrap the launch at the last minute.

 

A strong password contains capital and lowercase letters, numbers and some special characters.  Done properly, the result is a password that grants access to computer systems to the proper user.  The only problem is the password is hard to remember, and it’s not supposed to be written on yellow sticky notes that can sometimes be found on the bottom of keyboards.  And don’t get comfortable with this long password; it has to be changed every 90 days or so.

 

Speaking today at DARPA’s “Colloquium on Future Directions in Cyber Security,” DARPA Director, Regina E. Dugan, reinforced that the advent of the Internet more than 40 years ago created both tremendous opportunities and risks.

 

Less than 5 days after the launch of the Shredder Challenge, DARPA’s competition to identify the best tools and techniques for document reconstruction, teams have reconstructed the first two shredded documents and correctly solved the puzzles.  As of today, 16 teams have solved the first problem, and two teams have solved the second.