S. KOREA ROBOT WINS FIRST PRIZE AT DARPA ROBOT FINALS

FROM:  U.S. DEFENSE DEPARTMENT

Right:  Team Kaist’s robot DRC-Hubo uses a tool to cut a hole in a wall during the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals, June 5-6, 2015, in Pomona, Calif. Team Kaist won the top prize at the competition. DARPA photo
   
Robots from South Korea, U.S. Win DARPA Finals
By Cheryl Pellerin
DoD News, Defense Media Activity

POMONA, Calif., June 7, 2015 – A robot from South Korea took first prize and two American robots took second and third prizes here yesterday in the two-day robotic challenge finals held by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Twenty-three human-robot teams participating in the DARPA Robotics Challenge, or DRC, finals competed for $3.5 million in prizes, working to get through eight tasks in an hour, under their own onboard power and with severely degraded communications between robot and operator.

A dozen U.S. teams and 11 from Japan, Germany, Italy, South Korea and Hong Kong competed in the outdoor competition.

DARPA launched the DRC in response to the nuclear disaster at Fukushima, Japan, in 2011 and the need for help to save lives in the toxic environment there.

Progress in Robotics

The DRC’s goal was to accelerate progress in robotics so robots more quickly can gain the dexterity and robustness they need to enter areas too dangerous for people and mitigate disaster impacts.

Robot tasks were relevant to disaster response -- driving alone, walking through rubble, tripping circuit breakers, using a tool to cut a hole in a wall, turning valves and climbing stairs.

Each team had two tries at the course with the best performance and times used as official scores. All three winners each had final scores of eight points, so they were arrayed from first to third place according to least time on the course.

DARPA program manager and DRC organizer Gill Pratt congratulated the 23 participating teams and thanked them for helping open a new era of human-robot partnerships.

Loving Robots

The DRC was open to the public, and more than 10,000 people over two days watched from the Fairplex grandstand as each robot ran its course. The venue was formerly known as the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds.

"These robots are big and made of lots of metal, and you might assume people seeing them would be filled with fear and anxiety," Pratt said during a press briefing at the end of day 2.

"But we heard groans of sympathy when those robots fell, and what did people do every time a robot scored a point? They cheered!” he added.

Pratt said this could be one of the biggest lessons from DRC -- “the potential for robots not only to perform technical tasks for us but to help connect people to one another."

South Korean Winning Team

Team Kaist from Daejeon, South Korea, and its robot DRC-Hubo took first place and the $2 million prize. Hubo comes from the words ‘humanoid robot.’

Team Kaist is from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, which professor JunHo Oh of the Mechanical Engineering Department called “the MIT of Korea,” and he led Team Kaist to victory here.

In his remarks at the DARPA press conference, Oh noted that researchers from a university commercial spinoff called Rainbow Co., built the Hubo robot hardware.

The professor said his team’s first-place prize doesn’t make DRC-Hubo the best robot in the world, but he’s happy with the prize, which he said helps demonstrate Korea’s technological capabilities.

Team IHMC Robotics

Coming in second with a $1 million prize is Team IHMC Robotics of Pensacola, Florida -- the Institute of Human and Machine Cognition -- and its robot Running Man.

Jerry Pratt leads a research group at IHMC that works to understand and model human gait and its applications in robotics, human assistive devices and man-machine interfaces.

“Robots are really coming a long way,” Pratt said.

“Are you going to see a lot more of them? It's hard to say when you'll really see humanoid robots in the world,” he added. “But I think this is the century of the humanoid robot. The real question is what decade? And the DRC will make that decade come maybe one decade sooner.”

Team Tartan Rescue

In third place is Team Tartan Rescue of Pittsburgh, winning $500,000. The robot is CHIMP, which stands for CMU highly intelligent mobile platform. Team members are from Carnegie Mellon University and the National Robotics Engineering Center.

Tony Stentz, NREC director, led Team Tartan Rescue, and during the press conference called the challenge “quite an experience.”

That experience was best captured, he said, “with our run yesterday when we had trouble all through the course, all kinds of problems, things we never saw before.”

While that was happening, Stentz said, the team operating the robot from another location kept their cool.

Promise for the Technology

“They figured out what was wrong, they tapped their deep experience in practicing with the machine, they tapped the tools available at their fingertips, and they managed to get CHIMP through the entire course, doing all of the tasks in less than an hour,” he added.

“That says a lot about the technology and it says a lot about the people,” Stentz said, “and I think it means that there's great promise for this technology.”

All the winners said they would put most of the prize money into robotics research and share a portion with their team members.

After the day 2 competition, Arati Prabhakar, DARPA director, said this is the end of the 3-year-long DARPA Robotics Challenge but “the beginning of a future in which robots can work alongside people to reduce the toll of disasters."

THE MILITARY SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY BUDGET DISCUSSED BY OFFICIALS FROM DOD

FROM:  U.S. DEFENSE DEPARTMENT DEFENSE

Right:  The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s research and development in stealth technology during the 1970s and 1980s led to the world’s most advanced radar-evading aircraft, providing strategic national security advantage to the United States. Today, hypersonic technologies have the potential to provide the dominance once afforded by stealth to support a range of future national security missions. DARPA photo.  

DoD Officials Discuss Science, Technology Budget
By Cheryl Pellerin
DoD News, Defense Media Activity

WASHINGTON, April 24, 2015 – The Defense Department has maintained a steady $12 billion investment in science and technology and is using new initiatives to boost innovation and military superiority, defense officials told a Senate panel April 22.

Frank Kendall, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, testified before the Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee on the DoD budget request for fiscal year 2016.

Joining him were Alan Shaffer, acting assistant secretary of defense for development, research and engineering, and Steven Walker, deputy director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.

The department’s science and technology budget request for fiscal year 2016 is $12.2 billion, Kendall said.

Steady Investment

“Over the last several years we have maintained, despite all the budget fluctuations, a fairly steady investment in terms of technology,” he said.

The department is committed to pursuing innovation in all its dimensions, said Kendall, adding that Defense Secretary Ash Carter endorsed the Defense Innovation Initiative unveiled last fall, and yesterday at Stanford University the secretary announced steps the department will take to foster innovation.

Kendall’s efforts cover the broader DoD acquisition enterprise, and two weeks ago he announced final details and implementation guidance for Better Buying Power 3.0.

“The Better Buying Power label originated when Dr. Carter was undersecretary for acquisition, technology and logistics … but it's really a collection of initiatives that has evolved over time,” Kendall said.

Improving DoD Acquisition

The initiatives are designed to incrementally improve the acquisition system’s performance, he said.

The acquisition system includes not only major DoD programs, Kendall said, “but everything -- all the things we contract out for, all the things the department acquires … and services are more than half of the things we contract out for. And it certainly includes our science and technology investments.”

Kendall said the most recent version focuses on innovation, technical excellence and technological superiority, and on taking steps to spur innovation and get the greatest value from research and development and from new innovation sources.

The efforts, he added, include science and technology accounts, DARPA's budget, the work of DoD labs, contracted research and development,
reimbursable independent research and development conducted by industry, the Small Business Innovation Research Program, and others.

Incentivizing Industry

Several BBP 3.0 provisions are designed to incentivize industry, Kendall said.
“One of them is … to tell industry how much we're willing to pay for enhanced performance,” he said.

Normally when the department asks for a weapon system proposal, it sets a level of threshold performance that is the minimum it will accept, Kendall explained. DoD also sets an objective -– the performance it desires and that comes with a higher price, he said.

“Industry almost uniformly bids to the threshold level and ignores the objective because the threshold level is always cheaper,” he added, noting, “It's less capable and that goes with [the lower] cost.”

The undersecretary said the department is starting to communicate to industry “how much more we're willing to pay for that higher level of performance. Industry can then make an informed judgment about whether or not to invest in technology that will get to that level of performance.”

Without that information, Kendall said, there's no incentive for industry.
More Creative Products

“We're trying to involve industry earlier-on in concept definition and requirements formulation so we have an interaction with industry.” Kendall said. “We give industry a head start … to work on how they would satisfy our requirements.”

In general, he added, “we're trying to align our financial incentive structure with the things we want. In this case, what we want is innovation -- more creative, more capable products that we can get to the warfighter.”

In his remarks, Shaffer said his office has revised the way it plans and executes the science and technology program through Reliance 21.

Reliance 21 is “an oversight construct that has created communities of interest, bringing scientists working in specific technology areas together to jointly plan and execute their departmentwide program in a more effective way,” he said.

Defense Innovation

Shaffer said his office also is directly involved in the Defense Innovation Initiative and in many specific initiatives under BBP 3.0.

He said the DII is a departmentwide effort to identify and invest in novel ways to sustain and advance military superiority for the 21st century and improve business operations.

Under BBP 3.0, he said, “we are more tightly coupling acquisition requirements and the intelligence community to more dynamically adjust to changes in potential threats,” and addressing barriers to adopting commercial technology in systems and capabilities.

Shaffer said his office is increasing its use of prototypes and experimentation departmentwide to reduce technical risk early in a program cycle and to see how systems will operate. The office also is expanding the use of modular open-systems architecture to stimulate innovation.

Breakthrough Technologies

In his remarks to the panel, Walker said DARPA’s role is to make early pivotal investments that help develop breakthrough technologies for national security.
Walker highlighted two programs that DARPA is working on with the Air Force, both in hypersonics –- referring to a flow of air with a Mach number greater than five. This means the flow speed is more than five times the speed of sound, he explained.

One program is the Tactical Boost Glide system, Walker said.

This DARPA-Air Force effort will develop and demonstrate technologies to enable air-launched tactical-range hypersonic boost glide systems, including a flight demonstration.

Basically, Walker said, “you boost it with a rocket and glide the system to the target.”

Tactical Hypersonics

The second DARPA-Air Force effort is the Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept, designed to enable transformational changes in responsive, long-range strike against time-critical or heavily defended targets.

“You also boost that concept,” Walker said, “that you then take over with the air-breathing scramjet engine on board and that also hits its target.”

This program, according to DARPA, seeks to advance air vehicle configurations capable of efficient hypersonic flight, enhance hydrocarbon scramjet-powered propulsion to enable sustained hypersonic cruise, develop affordable system designs and manufacturing approaches, and more.

“What [hypersonic speeds] buy you is a strike capability for time-critical targets from long-standoff ranges,” Walker said.

“If we can pull that hypersonic technology into a weapon-system concept … at the end of these programs the Air Force would be ready to go off into an acquisition program on those systems -- potentially, if we're successful. That's really the future,” he added.

The Sequestration Threat

During the hearing, Kendall told the panel that one threat to U.S. military superiority is “one of our own making. It is the threat of sequestration.”

In the fiscal year 2016 DoD budget request, the department is asking for funding that is well above sequestration levels, he said.

“We are trying to recover some of the readiness that was lost when sequestration was implemented in 2013. We are also trying to acquire some of the capability we need to maintain to remain competitive,” said Kendall, adding that the department is requesting increases in its investment accounts, research and development, and procurement, of about $20 billion.

“Sequestration would force us to prioritize pressing near-term needs at the expense of these investments, preserving capability now but increasing our risk in the future,” he said, adding that uncertainties about future budgets make effective planning nearly impossible.

“We urge you to permanently repeal the threat of sequestration,” Kendall told the senators. “Removing this specter would do more than any other single act to spur innovation and preserve our military technological superiority.”

DEFENSE ADVANCED RESEARCH PROJECTS AGENCY HOSTS DARPA DEMO DAY 2014

FROM:  U.S. DEFENSE DEPARTMENT 

Right:  The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Big Mechanism program aims to leapfrog state-of-the-art big data analytics by developing automated technologies -- illustrated by this information flow chart -- to help explain the causes and effects that drive complicated systems such as diseases like cancer. DARPA graphic.


DARPA Innovations Advance National Security
By Cheryl Pellerin
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, May 21, 2014 – The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Information Innovation Office, or I2O, is hosting DARPA Demo Day 2014 in the Pentagon’s courtyard today to highlight the agency’s ongoing contributions to preserving and expanding the Defense Department’s information technology superiority.

The Pentagon event has a focus on information technology and it showcases more than 100 projects that push for game-changing improvements to national security. IT, according to DARPA, is a key enabler for DOD and has been a focus area for DARPA since its establishment in 1958.

“The information revolution has been a huge boon to society,” I2O Director Daniel Kaufman said, adding, “but our growing dependence on information networks also means that information is today’s tactical and strategic high ground, increasingly targeted by adversaries from everyday criminals to networked terrorists who would do our nation mortal harm.”

Kaufman said I2O’s mission is to ensure the safety and reliability of essential information technologies against challenges the nation faces today and those in the future.

DARPA contributions include its development and prototyping of technology for what is now the Internet.

The DOD currently enjoys IT superiority, according to a DARPA press statement, but that superiority can’t be taken for granted.

The Pentagon event showcases an array of DARPA projects designed, as DARPA officials describe it, to quickly and profoundly change the way the nation addresses growing national security challenges posed by the information revolution and by the increasing global availability of sophisticated information technologies.

DOD officials, defense contractors and invited public-sector innovators heard DARPA program managers and project principals describe their progress toward game-changing advances in areas such as cybersecurity, networked warfighter systems, language translation and decision support.

Together, according to the DARPA statement, the displays pointed to a future in which networks will be increasingly resilient to natural and human-launched threats. And in that future, lightning-fast detection of emergent, information-related irregularities, including potential threats, will inform equally fast correctives and countermeasures.

Advanced data analysis, automation and fusion technologies will enable the timely extraction of actionable, previously inaccessible insights from mountains of raw information, DARPA says, and enable sharing those insights through cutting-edge collaboration, data visualization and user-interface technologies.
The event highlighted 29 programs in four categories. Cyber includes approaches to maintaining IT systems safety and security. Big Data includes tools to facilitate the use of information at scale.

Language includes translation technologies to help warfighters communicate more effectively in foreign-language environments. And warfighter apps, which include other initiatives of great interest to DOD, such as the Revolutionizing Prosthetics program in DARPA’s new Biological Technologies Office.

Among the I2O programs on display were the following:
-- DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge, CGC: To be launched this summer, CGC will be the first-ever tournament for testing fully automatic network defense systems. The competition’s goal is to vastly improve the speed, scale and effectiveness of IT security against escalating cyber threats.

-- High-Assurance Cyber Military Systems, HACMS: Seeks to protect networked, embedded IT systems from cyberattack by creating semi-automated systems that build software according to formal methods and check that the created code is secure and works as intended.

-- Big Mechanism: Aims to leapfrog state-of-the-art big-data analytics by developing automated technologies to help explain causes and effects that drive complicated systems. Initial efforts will focus on research relating to cancer pathways.

-- Memex: Seeks to develop next-generation search technologies and revolutionize the discovery, organization and presentation of public-domain search results. Initially, DARPA intends to develop Memex to address fighting human trafficking.
-- Broad Operational Language Translation, BOLT: Seeks to create new techniques for automated translation and linguistic analysis that can be applied to informal text and speech common in online and in-person communication.
At DARPA, Kaufman said, “we help make the tools of the information revolution more powerful and useful, not just for those who ensure our security but also for the people and nations they protect.”

DEFENSE SECRETARY HAGEL OBSERVES DEVELOPING TECH DEMONSTRATION

Right:  Arati Prabhakar, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, briefs Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel on the Atlas robot and other robotics at the Pentagon, April 22, 2014. The program showcased DARPA technologies and how they contribute to U.S. national security. DOD photo by Marine Corps Sgt. Aaron Hostutler.  

FROM:  U.S. DEFENSE DEPARTMENT 
DARPA Officials Show Hagel Technologies Under Development
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, April 23, 2014 – Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program personnel demonstrated five technologies under development to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel in the secretary's conference room yesterday.
DARPA Director Arati Prabhakar provided the secretary with a demonstration of the agency's latest prosthetics technology.

The wounded warrior demonstrating the device was Fred Downs Jr., an old friend of Hagel's who lost an arm in a landmine explosion while fighting in Vietnam. Hagel hugged him and shook his mechanical hand, with Downs joking, "I don't want to hurt you."

"He and I worked together many years ago," said Hagel, who earned two Purple Hearts during his service as an enlisted soldier in Vietnam. "How you doing, Fred? How's your family?"

Downs demonstrated how he controls movements of the arm, which appeared to be partly covered in translucent white plastic, with two accelerometers strapped to his feet. Through a combination of foot movements, he's able to control the elbow, wrist and fingers in a variety of movements, including the “thumbs-up” sign he gave Hagel.

It took only a few hours to learn to control the arm, Downs said.
"It's the first time in 45 years, since Vietnam, I'm able to use my left hand, which was a very emotional time," he said.

Dr. Justin Sanchez, a medical doctor and program manager at DARPA who works with prosthetics and brain-related technology, told Hagel that DARPA's arm is designed to mimic the shape, size and weight of a human arm. It's modular too, so it can replace a lost hand, lower arm or a complete arm.

Hagel said such technology would have a major impact on the lives of injured troops.

"This is transformational," he said. "We've never seen anything like this before."
Next, Sanchez showed Hagel a video of a patient whose brain had been implanted with a sensor at the University of Pittsburgh, allowing her to control an arm with her thoughts.

Matt Johannes, an engineer from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, showed Hagel a shiny black hand and arm that responds to brain impulses. The next step is to put sensors in the fingers that can send sensations back to the brain.

"If you don't have line of sight on something you're trying to grab onto, you can use that sensory information to assist with that task," Johannes said.
The tactile feedback system should be operational within a few months, he said.
"People said it would be 50 years before we saw this technology in humans," Sanchez said. "We did it in a few years."

Next, officials gave Hagel an overview of the DARPA Robotic Challenge, a competition to develop a robot for rescue and disaster response that was inspired by the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear incident in Japan.

Virginia Tech University's entrant in the contest, the hulking 6-foot-2-inch Atlas robot developed by Boston Dynamics, stood in the background as Hagel was shown a video of robots walking over uneven ground and carrying things.

Brad Tousley, head of DARPA's Tactical Technology Office, explained to Hagel that Hollywood creates unrealistic expectations of robotic capability. In fact, he said, building human-like robots capable of autonomously doing things such as climbing ladders, opening doors and carrying things requires major feats of engineering and computer science.

Journalists were escorted out before the remaining three technologies could be demonstrated because of classified concerns. A defense official speaking on background told reporters that Hagel was brought up to date on the progress of three other DARPA programs:

-- Plan X, a foundational cyberwarfare program to develop platforms for the Defense Department to plan for, conduct and assess cyberwarfare in a manner similar to kinetic warfare;

-- Persistent close air support, a system to, among other things, link up joint tactical air controllers with close air support aircraft using commercially available tablets; and

-- A long-range anti-ship missile, planned to reduce dependence on intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance platforms, network links and GPS navigation in electronic warfare environments. Autonomous guidance algorithms should allow the LRASM to use less-precise target cueing data to pinpoint specific targets in the contested domain, the official said. The program also focuses on innovative terminal survivability approaches and precision lethality in the face of advanced countermeasures.

(From a pool report.)

THE X-51A WAVERIDER ACHIEVES MACH 5.1 OVER THE PACIFIC

 

The X-51A Waverider prepares to launch its historic fourth and final flight. The cruiser achieved Mach 5.1 traveling 230 nautical miles in just over six minutes, making this test the longest air-breathing hypersonic flight ever. U.S. Air Force photo/Bobbi Zapka.

FROM: U.S. AIR FORCE
X-51A Waverider achieves breakthrough in final flight
by Daryl Mayer
88th Air Base Wing Public Affairs

5/3/2013 - WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio (AFNS) -- The final flight of the X-51A Waverider test program has accomplished a breakthrough in the development of flight reaching Mach 5.1 over the Pacific Ocean May 1.

"It was a full mission success," said Charlie Brink, the X-51A program manager for the Air Force Research Laboratory Aerospace Systems Directorate.

The cruiser traveled more than 230 nautical miles in just over six minutes over the Point Mugu Naval Air Warfare Center Sea Range, Calif. It was the longest of the four X-51A test flights and the longest air-breathing hypersonic flight ever.

"I believe all we have learned from the X-51A Waverider will serve as the bedrock for future hypersonics research and ultimately the practical application of hypersonic flight," Brink said.

The X-51A took off from the Air Force Test Center at Edwards AFB, Calif., under the wing of a B-52H Stratofortress. It was released at approximately 50,000 feet and accelerated to Mach 4.8 in about 26 seconds powered by a solid rocket booster. After separating from the booster, the cruiser's supersonic combustion ramjet, or scramjet, engine then lit and accelerated the aircraft to Mach 5.1 at 60,000 feet.

After exhausting its 240-second fuel supply, the vehicle continued to send back telemetry data until it splashed down into the ocean and was destroyed as designed. At impact, 370 seconds of data were collected from the experiment.

"This success is the result of a lot of hard work by an incredible team. The contributions of Boeing, Pratt and Whitney Rocketdyne, the 412th Test Wing at Edwards AFB, NASA Dryden and DARPA were all vital," Brink said.

This was the last of four test vehicles originally conceived when the $300 million technology demonstration program began in 2004. The program objective was to prove the viability of air-breathing, high-speed scramjet propulsion.

The X-51A is unique primarily due to its use of a hydrocarbon fuel in its scramjet engine. Other vehicles have achieved hypersonic, generally defined as speeds above Mach 5, flight with the use of hydrogen fuel. Without any moving parts, hydrocarbon fuel is injected into the scramjet's combustion chamber where it mixes with the air rushing through the chamber and is ignited in a process likened to lighting a match in a hurricane.

The use of logistically supportable hydrocarbon fuel is widely considered vital for the practical application of hypersonic flight.

As a technology demonstration program, there is no immediate successor to the X-51A program. However, the Air Force will continue hypersonic research and the successes of the X-51A will pay dividends to the High Speed Strike Weapon program currently in its early formation phase with AFRL.

DARPA AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL FRONTIER

FROM: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE

DARPA Reaches Beyond Technological Frontiers for Warfighters
By Claudette Roulo
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, April 25, 2013 – In 1957, the entire world was surprised by the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial Earth satellite.

In response, President Dwight D. Eisenhower founded the Advanced Research Projects Agency -- now called the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency -- the following year, and he directed it to prevent further technological surprises by reaching beyond the frontiers of technology and science and immediate military requirements.

In the 55 years since DARPA was founded, it has succeeded in preventing technological surprise -- and has created surprise of its own, DARPA Director Arati Prabhakar told reporters at the Pentagon yesterday.

"Today, if you look at how we fight, you will find in our military capabilities really critical systems and capabilities like precision guidance and navigation, like stealth technologies, like [unmanned aerial vehicles], communications and networking, night-vision systems," she said, all developed, in part, due to pivotal early investments by DARPA.

"And our warfighters have taken this suite of capabilities and turned it into a way to change the face of war," Prabhakar said.

In making those investments, DARPA paved the way for leaps forward in capability, she said. "That's really our role," she added. "That's what our function is. That's what we've done for many generations and that's what we're going to be doing again for the next generation."

DARPA is a small agency, Prabhakar said. About half of its roughly 200 employees are experts from throughout the technical and military communities who serve as program managers for short terms of about three to five years. The rotational nature of the program manager positions allows the agency to tap into a broad technical community, she said, a tactic that gives DARPA influence that far outweighs its size.

"The job for the rest of us [at DARPA] is to recruit these stellar individuals, to construct a balanced portfolio of programs from the ideas that they generate, and ultimately … enable these program managers to take the kind of risk that is inherent in reaching for high payoff," she said. "And all of that is really what keeps the DARPA engine humming," Prabhakar added.

Incoming program managers listen to what is happening in the technical community to learn where the breakthrough opportunities are, Prabhakar said, and learn from the military community what they see as their future needs.

"From all of those inputs, our program managers create DARPA programs that they think really have the potential to change the world," she said. "When they start building these programs, of course, they build these new technology capabilities [and] … technical communities that really can move our abilities forward in a really powerful way."

While DARPA’s mission hasn’t changed in 55 years, the same can’t be said of the world in which it operates, Prabhakar said. Now is a good time for DARPA to step back and assess its view of future missions, she added, particularly in the context of today’s realities.

The agency identified three major trends that it views as critical in shaping DARPA’s effort to build "radical new solutions," Prabhakar said.

"The first major factor that we see is we believe we're going to be in an extended period during which our national security will face a wide range of different types of threats from a wide range of different actors," she told reporters. Not just nation-states, but also terrorist and criminal organizations and even individuals, she said.

These actors now have access to a wide range of tools that can create effects once limited only to nations, she said -- weapons of mass destruction or mass terror and cyberattacks, for example. "So the No. 1 major factor that we really pay attention to is this complex, fluid, shifting national security environment that we think we will be facing for an extended period of time."

The second factor, she said, is the rapid advances in military technology made by other nations. This, combined with other factors, has led to a prevalence of obsolete and publicly available technology in U.S. military systems. "That's a trend that we expect will continue," Prabhakar said. "I think that's going to be a fact of life in the world that we're living in."

Fiscal constraints are the third trend shaping DARPA’s future, she said. "We believe we may be at the beginning of a fundamental shift in how our society allocates resources to the business of national security," she added.

Prabhakar said she’s not referring only to the immediate issues around sequestration spending cuts. "What I'm really talking about here are the fiscal pressures that could shape a different future over the coming years and decades," she explained, "and, if it turns out to be the case that we don't allocate this continuing level of support for national security as a society, it actually won't change the fact that our job will still be to keep the country as safe and secure as is humanly possible.

"So these three factors create a very challenging environment that we're going to be facing for an extended period of time," she continued. "I think these are factors that create an environment that calls for a DARPA and for the DARPA approaches to thinking outside the box more than ever before."

DARPA will continue to invest in "game-changers," Prabhakar said. "[Investing] in radical new systems concepts, in radical new technologies that can enable new capabilities, that's something that DARPA has done for 55 years, and we're going to do it today, and we'll hope we'll do it for the next 55 years at least."

The agency is also taking new approaches, she said. "We're thinking about how we can make the systems of the future more readily adaptable," she added, "so that they can be configured for whatever actual threat emerges in time, or can be reconfigured in real time in an engagement so that we can adapt more quickly than adversaries might in a battle environment."

The organization also seeks ideas that can "invert the cost equation," Prabhakar said. These types of approaches not only would reduce program costs, but also would force adversaries to spend more money to counter the technology than the technology cost to develop and implement, she explained.

"And then, finally, we're also thinking about the fact that DARPA's in the ‘silver bullet’ business, but in fact, even our most powerful capability will not single-handedly change the face of war for the next generation," she said.

One way to realize such a far-reaching change is by combining technologies, she said. "That's how I think we've created the last big shift in military capability," she added, "and we see how that could be possible looking forward."

DARPA's objective is a new generation of technology for national security, Prabhakar said.

"If we're successful, as I think we really must be in this DARPA endeavor, what that will mean for the future is that our future leaders and commanders will have real options, powerful options for all the range of threats that we face in the years and decades ahead," she said. "That's really how we will enable our nation to achieve its strategic objectives in a decisive fashion."

PENTAGON OFFICIAL SAYS BUDGET CUTS LIMIT RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT



Credit:  U.S. Air Force. Launch Of GPS Satellite.

FROM: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
Budget Reductions Limit Science, Tech Development, Official Says

By Army Sgt. 1st Class Tyrone C. Marshall Jr.
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, April 18, 2013 - The Defense Department's research and engineering department faces the same challenges the rest of the department does due to limitations caused by sequestration spending cuts, a senior Pentagon official said today.

Alan R. Shaffer, acting assistant secretary of defense for research and engineering, was joined by Arati Prabhakar, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, before the Senate Armed Services Committee's subcommittee on emerging threats and capabilities to talk about their part of the fiscal year 2014 defense budget request.

Shaffer said he represents scientists and engineers from DOD, a group that "conceives, develops and matures systems" early in the acquisition process.

"They work with multiple partners to provide the unmatched operational advantage employed by our services' men and women," he said. "As we wind down in Afghanistan, the national security and budget environments are changing."

The president's fiscal 2014 budget request for science and technology is $12 billion -- a nominal increase from fiscal 2013's $11.9 billion, Shaffer said, noting that it isn't possible to discuss the budget without addressing the impact of sequestration, "which takes 9 percent from every single program" in research, development, testing and evaluation.

"This reduction will delay or terminate some efforts," he said. "We will reduce awards. For instance, we will reduce university grants by $200 million this year alone."

Potentially, he added, the number of new SMART Scholarships —an acronym that stands for science, mathematics and research for transformation -- could go down to zero, and sequestration cuts will cause other limitations for research and engineering departments.

"Because of the way the sequester was implemented, we will be very limited in hiring new scientists this year, and the [next] several years," he said.

Each of these actions, Shaffer said, will have a negative long-term impact on the department and to national security.

"The president and secretary of defense depend upon us to make key contributions to the defense of our nation," he said. "[Science and technology] should do three things for national security."

Shaffer said science and technology should mitigate current and emerging threats and that the budget should build affordability and affordably enable current and future weapons systems to operate.

Also necessary, he said, is developing "technology surprise" to prevent potential adversaries from threatening the United States.

"In summary, the department's research and engineering program is faced with the same challenges as the rest of the DOD and the nation," he said, "but our people are performing."

Prabhakar focused on DARPA's goals in her testimony.

"[Our] objective is a new generation of technology for national security, and to realize this new set of military capabilities and systems is going to take a lot of organizations and people," she said.

"But DARPA's role in that is to make the pivotal early investments that change what's possible," she added. "[This] really lets us take big steps forward in our capabilities for the future."

The director said DARPA is investing in a host of areas to include building a future where war fighters can have cyber as a tactical tool that's fully integrated into the kinetic fight.

"And we're building a new generation of electronic warfare that leapfrogs what others around the world are able to do with widely, globally available semiconductor technology," she said.

"It means we're investing in new technologies for position, navigation and timing, so that our people and our platforms are not critically reliant as they are today on GPS," Prabhakar said.

The director also noted DARPA is investing in a new generation of space and robotics, advanced weapon systems, new platforms, and a new "foundational" infrastructure of emerging technologies in different areas of software and electronics, and material science.

The aim, Prabhakar said, is to create real and powerful options for future commanders and leaders against whatever threats the nation faces in the years ahead.

"And that work is the driver behind all of our programs," she said. "It's the reason that the people at DARPA run to work every morning with their hair on fire. They know that they're part of a mission that really does matter for our future security as a country.

FLYING ROBOTS WITH DEPTH PERCEPTION

 

Still-frame from video captured during testing. Here, the arm is advancing with the claw ready to clamp onto the rung of the ladder. Credit: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

　
FROM:  U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE 'ARMED WITH SCIENCE'

What A UAV Can Do With Depth Perception

byjtozer

When a person reaches out to place an object in just the right place, their mind makes a series of judgments requiring vision, stability and careful movement.

Trying to do the same thing robotically from a hovering unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) requires several technology advances.

A DARPA-funded technology demonstration recently finished a successful testing of vision-driven robotic-arm payload emplacement using MLB Company’s (Santa Clara, California) tail-sitter UAV, V-Bat. This UAV is capable of both hover and wing-borne flight, making the delivery and precision emplacement of a payload possible.

A special robotic arm was designed with the capability of carrying up to 1 pound.

The research team designed and developed a low-cost vision system to estimate the target’s position relative to the hovering vehicle in real time. This vision system enables the UAV to search and find the target for the emplacement autonomously and then perform the action.

DARPA’s precision emplacement technology demonstration paves the way for precise long-range delivery of small payloads into difficult-to-reach environments.

"Our goal with the UAV payload emplacement demonstration was to show we could quickly develop and integrate the right technology to make this work," said Dan Patt, DARPA program manager. "The success of the demonstration further enables the capabilities of future autonomous aerial vehicles."

During this technology demonstration, the MLB Company-built V-Bat successfully demonstrated:
A newly developed stereo vision system that tracks the emplacement target and motion of the robotic arm. The vision system, coupled with global positioning system, controls the arm and V-Bat during emplacement.

Control logic to maneuver the vehicle and direct the robotic arm to accurately engage the emplacement target.

Vehicle stability with the arm extended 6 feet with a 1-pound payload.

Autonomous search and detection of the emplacement target and autonomously emplaced a 1-pound payload.

LS3 ROBOT: NOT QUITE R2D2, YET!

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Legged Squad Support System will relieve troops of their 100-pound equipment load, take voice commands and maneuver around obstacles, in addition to numerous other tasks in the field. DARPA photo.

FROM: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE

Robot to Serve as Future Military's 'Pack Mule'
By Terri Moon Cronk
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, Dec. 19, 2012 - The warfighter who carries up to 100 pounds of equipment on his back is expected to get relief from the cumbersome weight, officials at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency say.

Enter the robot.

It's not just any robot. DARPA's semiautonomous Legged Squad Support System -- also known as the LS3 -- will carry 400 pounds of warfighter equipment, walk 20 miles at a time, and act as an auxiliary power source for troops to recharge batteries for radios and handheld devices while on patrol.

Now in trials, the "pack mule" robot might have numerous functions, but its primary responsibility is to support the warfighter, said Army Lt. Col. Joseph K. Hitt, program manager in DARPA's tactical technology office.

"It's about solving a real military problem: the incredible load of equipment our soldiers and Marines carry in Afghanistan today," Hitt said. The consequences of that kind of load can be soft-tissue injuries and other complications, he added.

And as the weight of their equipment has increased, so have instances of fatigue, physical strain and degraded performance, officials have noted. Reducing the load warfighters carry has become a major point for research and development, DARPA officials say, because the increasing weight of equipment has a negative effect on warfighter readiness.

DARPA's five-year, $54 million LS3 project began in September 2009, and now is undergoing trials in the field. The LS3 must become familiar with different types of terrain, from wooded areas to deserts, and with varying weather conditions such as rain and snow, Hitt explained.

The LS3 prototype completed its first outdoor assessment in January, demonstrating its mobility by climbing and descending a hill and exercising its perception capabilities.

Following a "highly successful" trial at Fort Pickett near Blackstone, Va., earlier this month, Hitt said, the robot worked with the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory there and developed additional behaviors.

The robot's sensors allow it to navigate around obstacles at night, maneuver in urban settings, respond to voice commands, and gauge distances and directions. The LS3 also can distinguish different forms of vegetation, Hitt said, when walking through fields and around bushes. With the ability to avoid logs and rocks, the LS3's intelligent foot placement on rough terrain is a key element, he said.

The next trial will challenge the robot with the desert terrain at Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Base in California, and subsequent trials will follow every three months, Hitt said.

"The vision is a trained animal and its handler," he said, adding that a squad leader would learn 10 basic commands to tell the robot to do such things as stop, sit, follow him tightly, follow him on the corridor, and go to specific coordinates.

"The technology of the robot focuses on mobility, perception and human-robot interaction," Hitt said.

With the expectation of delivering the first LS3 to a Marine Corps squad in two years, the program culminates a decade of research and development. Yet it still needs some tweaks, Hitt acknowledged.

"We have to make sure the robot is smart like a trained animal," he said. "We need to make sure it can follow a leader in his path, or follow in its own chosen path that's best for itself. The interaction between the leader and the robot [must be] intuitive and natural."

DEFENSE ADVANCED RESEARCH PROJECTS AGENCY'S FUTURE

Photo:  Arati Prabhakar
FROM: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE

New Director Details Elements of DARPA's Future Success

By Cheryl Pellerin
American Forces Press Service
 WASHINGTON, Oct. 23, 2012 - Breakthrough national security capabilities, a differentiated U.S. technology base and a continued robust Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are elements of DARPA's future success, Arati Prabhakar, the agency's director, said here yesterday.

Prabhakar, who started July 30 as DARPA's new director, addressed an audience of Office of Naval Research leaders and program managers and members of industry, academia and other government agencies at ONR's Naval Science and Technology Partnership Conference.

"We are working today on projects that will make an impact in the next two years and the next four years and the next six years, but that's just the tip of the spear," Prabhakar said. "The true impact from the work we're doing today is going to be felt over a period of a decade or two decades or three decades. So I like to imagine a future in 2025 or 2030, or maybe even 2035, [in which we're] able to go back and say, 'We did the right things ... and made the right investments and found the right people to work with.'"

The director, who received a doctorate in applied physics and a master of science degree in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology, joined DARPA as a program manager in 1986. Over seven years, she initiated and managed programs in advanced semiconductor technology, flexible manufacturing and demonstration projects to insert new semiconductor technologies into military systems.

She also was the founding director of DARPA's Microelectronics Technology Office, leading a team of program managers in optoelectronics, infrared imaging, nanoelectronics and other areas.

During 19 years away from DARPA, in a career spent investing in world-class engineers and scientists to create new technologies and businesses, Prabhakar said, she had a proprietary interest in the results of her early work at the agency.

"I found that the work I did and that my office had done and that my colleagues across the agency did in partnership with the services and the commercial sector led to a blossoming of capability over a couple of decades," the director said.

"As I watched, I saw our soldiers own the battlefield because of the capabilities we had given them in sensing and communications and navigation and a host of other technologies. And in the commercial sector, I watched an explosion of capability in wireless communications and consumer electronics," she recalled.

Looking across the U.S. technical community, she said, she saw "one person after another who had been part of the projects that we had worked on in the early days when I was at DARPA, and those individuals went on to make huge contributions to businesses, to national security and to academia."

As she thought about returning to DARPA this summer, Prabhakar said, she considered the impact she and the agency could have on national security, the nation's technology base and the technical community.

"There really is no better place [to be than] embedded in this particular community. ... In the years that I'm with DARPA, I hope we can make the kinds of investments that have the same hugely disproportionate impact in the years to come," she said.

DARPA was created after the Soviet Union sent Sputnik into space in 1957, Prabhakar said, creating the first artificial Earth satellite and a rude technological surprise for the United States.

"Our core mission then and now is to focus on creating [strategic] surprise and preventing that kind of surprise for our country," the director explained, adding that breakthrough national security capabilities ultimately are about creating decisive surprise -- the kind that changes outcomes.

This year is an especially interesting time to think about how to create surprise in U.S. national security, she said.

"We're winding up over a decade of two ground wars and dealing with counterinsurgency challenges," Prabhakar noted. "It's an important time for us all, and DARPA in particular, to put our heads up, to look ahead, to think about what the future issues are going to be for national security and to have that influence the work we'll be doing in this time period."

One program in development at DARPA to deal with today's more complex, less predictable world is a long-range anti-ship-missile called LRASM.

"It's an approach to a new weapon system that fundamentally changes the way our sailors will engage with a very sophisticated enemy defense capability," she said.

The missile's own high degree of sophistication will dramatically change the range at which sailors can engage, how things go if they're in a GPS-denied environment, and what sailors have to know about their target, the director said.

"We think this can be the next generation of advanced cruise missile," she added. "It's a project where we've made a tremendous amount of progress working with the Navy and the contractor community, and I think it ... is a great example of one of many projects at DARPA that can dramatically change a specific mission or a specific scenario."

But even LRASM is no silver bullet for the future battlefield, the director said, "so when we step back and [consider] what it would take to change the ... warfighting environment in a radical and fundamental way, that's a much tougher question."

It will help to add to LRASM new technologies that will advance electronic warfare in dramatic ways and the ability to conduct effective cyber defense and cyber offense in a tactical environment, she said.

"We're going to take communications technology to the next level, the next generation of [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] technology," Prabhakar added, and broaden the position, navigation and timing technologies that will allow the services to operate without relying on GPS.

"All of those technology vectors are, in fact, advancing, and they and other technologies, as you think about a future where all of those advances have occurred, you can start to imagine radical new ways of [fighting]," the director said.

"I think it's going to be through those efforts that we can start coming up with answers to the question, How do we create a completely new scenario, a completely new way of engagement?" she added.

A second element in DARPA's future success is a highly differentiated technology base, the director said, because none of the new national security capabilities will happen without one.

Unlike the post-World War II era, when the United States often had the luxury of using advanced technologies invented and developed at home, she added, "that's really not the case today for so many of the technologies upon which our national security depends."

Virtually every aspect of information technology -- from networking to communications to software systems, components and integrated circuits -- along with materials and many areas of manufacturing technology, are globally available, and aren't even available in the United States, Prabhakar said.

"Our task today is a little bit different, because in these areas we still have to create the most effective defense solutions despite the fact that we don't get that edge that prevents our adversaries from building their own systems," the director added.

"That means we have to be the most sophisticated and the most effective users of globally available technologies, and that's a different kind of challenge," she said, "but ... it's one that can be tackled by building a capability for implementing advanced systems and doing aggressive systems engineering."

Prabhakar said she sees brewing in the scientific community a set of laboratory capabilities that could create opportunities "for some period of time -- not forever, maybe for some years or even decades -- [that] we can aspire to having a U.S. capability that our adversaries don't have."

One potential area is engineering biology, she said, a discipline from which "we're starting to see the prospect for building engineering tools and infrastructure that would allow us to get a degree of engineering control over biology and its ability to produce, for example, new materials and new interesting components."

The area still is very research oriented, she added, "but it's one where we could easily imagine over a period of five or 10 years the creation of a radical infrastructure ... that allows you to tackle these new technologies ... and open up a wide swath of interesting applications."

The third objective for DARPA's success is for the agency to remain vibrant and robust, the director said.

That happens if DARPA continues to engage the broad community -- companies large and small, in and out of the defense business; the services and service laboratories; and the university community -- to seek technological opportunities and the new windows that are opening in the research environment, she explained.

"I think the world we're living in today is a complex and challenging one," Prabhakar said. "I'm pretty sure that's going to be true in the future, and I want to make sure that we have the capability to make our contribution to the solutions that we're going to need for those future generations."

U.S. AIR FORCE SPACE COMMAND: THE LAUNCH OF SPUTNIK

FROM: U.S. AIR FORCE SPACE COMMAND
The USSR launches Sputnik I, the world's first successful artificial satellite on 4 Oct 1957. Pictured here is a model of Sputnik I from the Missile & Space Gallery at the National Museum of the United States Air Force.


AFSPC Milestone: USSR launched Sputnik, starting the space race

8/26/2012 - Peterson AFB, Colo. -- As Air Force Space Command approaches its 30th Anniversary on 1 Sep, here is a significant milestone which led to the creation of a new command responsible for the space domain...

On 4 October 1957, the USSR launches Sputnik I, the world's first successful artificial satellite. The surprise success of the Russian's launch began the Space Age and triggered the Space Race, a part of the larger Col War. It also lead to the launch of Explorer I, the first US satellite to go into orbit, launched from then Cape Canaveral Missile Annex, Fla. approximately 4 months later. Mercury batteries powered the high-power transmitter on Explorer I for 31 days and the low-power transmitter for 105 days. Explorer 1 stopped transmission of data on May 23, 1958 when its batteries died, but remained in orbit for more than 12 years. It has been followed by more than 90 scientific spacecraft in the Explorer series.

Additionally, the launch of Sputnik ushered in new political, military, technological, and scientific developments. The public reaction to the "Sputnik crisis" led to the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (renamed the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA in 1972), NASA, and an increase in U.S. government spending on scientific research and education.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND UNDERSTANDING INFERENCES

Icon Credit:  lcb.
FROM:  U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE ARMED WITH SCIENCE
DEEP EXPLORATION AND FILTERING TEXT  
Written on JUNE 8, 2012 AT 7:10 AM by JTOZER
Are You Inferring What I think You’re Inferring?
Much of the operationally-relevant information relied on in support of DoD missions may be implicit rather than explicitly expressed, and in many cases, information is deliberately obfuscated and important activities and objects are only indirectly referenced.”

In short, sometimes the meaning in messages just isn’t clear.  Ironic, isn’t it?
That can be a problem, though, especially on the ground where accurate and timely intelligence can affect the success or failure of a mission.

Through various and sundry means, DoD collects vast sets of data in the form of messages, documents, notes and the like, both on and off the battlefield. Thoroughly and efficiently processing this data to extract valuable content is a challenge based on volume alone, but the problem is magnified when important information within those files is deliberately masked by its authors.

So, what is there to do when you have commanders and warfighters on the front line depending on analysts to help them build informed plans?
Why, you use technology, of course.

DARPA is developing a new type of automated, deep natural-language understanding technology which they say may hold a solution for more efficiently processing text information.  A mumbo-jumbo decomplicator?
Go on…
When processed at its most basic level without ingrained cultural filters, language offers the key to understanding connections in text that might not be readily apparent to humans.  A “just the facts” approach is more effective than the “the give us the whole story” angle,
so to speak.  Also, it’s fun to talk like a 1940s detective.
But how do you do that?  Not the detective talk, sweetheart, I mean the dialing-it-down.  Getting to the root of the story.  The meat and potatoes of the whole shebang (okay, I’ll stop).

In short, DEFT.  At length…it makes more sense.
DARPA created the Deep Exploration and Filtering of Text (DEFT) program to harness the power of language. Sophisticated artificial intelligence of this nature has the potential to enable defense analysts to efficiently investigate documents so they can discover implicitly expressed, actionable information contained within them.
Letting the technology do the dirty work, eh? (last one I swear).

Actually that’s a smart idea.  But that implies that the system will be capable of understanding the thought that goes behind human communication, right?  How is an AI going to know what we mean by our vague platitudes or double entendres?  Will it know what I mean when I type LOL?

“DEFT is attempting to create technology to make reliable inferences based on basic text,” said Bonnie Dorr, DARPA program manager for DEFT.  “We want the ability to mitigate ambiguity in text by stripping away filters that can cloud meaning and by rejecting false information.  To be successful, the technology needs to look beyond what is explicitly expressed in text to infer what is actually meant.”

The development of an automated solution may rely on contributions from the linguistics and computer science fields in the areas of artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, machine learning, natural-language understanding, discourse and dialogue analysis, and others.

They could have used this in Star Trek, you know.  Something complicated would happen and then one of the characters would have to sum it up in a simple metaphor.  With DEFT, they could have taken all those pithy one-liners out.  Imagine all the time and energy they could have saved while the warp core breached.  Again.

DEFT will build on existing DARPA programs and ongoing academic re
search into deep language understanding and artificial intelligence to address remaining capability gaps related to inference, causal relationships and anomaly detection.

“Much of the basic research needed for DEFT has been accomplished, but now has to be scaled, applied and integrated through the development of new technology,” Dorr said.
As information is processed, DEFT also aims to integrate individual facts into large domain models for assessment, planning and prediction. If successful, DEFT will allow analysts to move from limited, linear processing of insurmountable quantities of data to a nuanced, strategic exploration of available information.

So, by reading between the overly-complicated lines, DEFT might actually be able to glean useful information from what would otherwise be muddled and confusing messages.  I wonder if they can turn this technology into a teenage-text filter so I can weed through the bizarre pseudo-cavemen texts I get from my cousin.  Then I’ll finally know what “IDK, TTYL8R” means.

SPACE-BASED TACTICAL INFORMATION IN REMOTE PLACES

FROM:  U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE ARMED WITH SCIENCE
Written on APRIL 24, 2012 AT 7:50 AM by JTOZER
Satellite Sight For the Frontlines
Image is everything.
In the case of military members on the front lines, quick, reliable satellite images are important, but unfortunately not always easy to come by.  Today, the lowest echelon members of the U.S. military deployed in remote overseas locations are unable to obtain on-demand satellite imagery in a timely and persistent manner for pre-mission planning.

This is due to lack of satellite overflight opportunities, inability to receive direct satellite downlinks at the tactical level and information flow restrictions.

DARPA’s SeeMe program (Space Enabled Effects for Military Engagements) 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.

“We envision a constellation of small satellites, at a fraction of the cost of airborne systems, that would allow deployed warfighters overseas to hit ‘see me’ on existing handheld devices and in less than 90 minutes receive a satellite image of their precise location to aid in mission planning,” said Dave Barnhart, DARPA program manager.

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.

“SeeMe is a logical adjunct to UAV technology, which will continue to provide local or regional very high-resolution coverage, but which can’t cover extended areas without frequent refueling,” Barnhart said. “With a SeeMe constellation, we hope to directly support warfighters in multiple deployed overseas locations simultaneously with no logistics or maintenance costs beyond the warfighters’ handhelds.”