Department of Defense

DARPA is seeking innovative concepts from small businesses and nontraditional defense contractors in the technical domain of space superiority as the second topic issued under the agency's Bringing Classified Innovation to Defense and Government Systems (BRIDGES) initiative.

Commercial drone technology is advancing rapidly, providing cost-effective and robust capabilities for a variety of civil and military missions. As small aerial vehicles play increasingly important military roles on the battlefield, adversaries are developing electromagnetic countermeasures to disrupt communication links between operator and drone, forcing the vehicle to abort mission, return to its starting point, or crash.

As ships, boats, and uncrewed underwater vehicles (UUVs) move through the water, they experience resistance, or drag, caused by waves and friction from water contact with the hull. Drag increases as the water traveling around the hull transitions from laminar flow - water that moves along smooth paths in neat layers - to chaotic, turbulent flow - water that moves in chaotic and unpredictable paths. Vessels require more power to accelerate in turbulent conditions.

DARPA is entering the first phase of the Persistent Optical Wireless Energy Relay (POWER) program, aimed at revolutionizing energy distribution through airborne wireless power transfer. Three teams -- led by RTX Corporation, Draper Laboratory, and BEAM Co. -- will design and develop wireless optical power relays. The program goals include demonstrating the key components necessary for a resilient, speed-of-light energy network.

DARPA awarded $750,000 to further develop solutions as part of AI Tools for Adult Learning - a competitive opportunity launched last fall that focused on helping adults learn complex topics necessary for the current and future national security workforce.

In popular culture, quantum is a descriptive term often added to various technical topics and projects to make them sound cool. But what is quantum mechanics, really, and how do we know whether quantum technologies will transform computing, communications, sensing, and a host of other fields?

Anticipating a burgeoning cislunar and lunar economy of scientific research and commercial development in the coming decade, DARPA is soliciting innovative and revolutionary technical approaches to chart a vision and path toward an optimized and integrated lunar infrastructure for peaceful U.S. and international use.

At Black Hat USA 2023, DARPA issued a call to top computer scientists, AI experts, software developers, and beyond to participate in the AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC) - a two-year competition aimed at driving innovation at the nexus of AI and cybersecurity to create a new generation of cybersecurity tools.

Current approaches for quantum computing, sensing, communications, and signal-processing rely on superconducting electronic devices that can manipulate or process information at quantum levels of precision. Due to the fragile nature of quantum mechanical processes, these devices need to be cooled to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero (-273 C / -460 F). This requires large refrigeration units that draw significant electrical power, limiting the scalability of current technology to achieve more robust quantum computing and sensing devices.

Emerging infectious disease hotspots are expected to increase globally within the next 50 years. Lab-based testing technology has advanced, but agnostic sample preservation still relies on refrigerated transport that can be difficult to acquire and is often unreliable in remote, austere, and contested environments. Consequently, samples critical to force health protection can be significantly degraded upon lab receipt.

The Assured Microbial Preservation in Harsh Or Remote Areas (AMPHORA) program aims to dissociate sample preservation from cold chains, enabling storage and maintaining viability in austere and remote environments.

There are many ideas in the world, but truly good ones are few and far between - especially when it comes to breakthrough technologies that can change the course of history. Surfacing these types of ideas calls for a constant infusion of fresh perspectives and imagination.

DARPA, in collaboration with NASA, is advancing toward the goal of the world's first in-orbit demonstration of a nuclear thermal rocket (NTR) engine via DRACO, the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations. DARPA has finalized an agreement with Lockheed Martin for the company to begin work on the fabrication and design of the experimental NTR vehicle (X-NTRV) and its engine.

DARPA's new Waste Upcycling for Defense (WUD) program aims to research and develop an end-to-end process for turning scrap wood and other cellulosic waste streams such as cardboard and paper into lightweight, strong, and sustainable materials for re-use in multiple DoD environments. If successful, WUD will help mitigate the DoD waste disposal burden, alleviate supply chain logistics, and reduce the overall carbon footprint associated with DoD construction and defense, while simultaneously providing a pathway for sustainable building materials.

With a focus on the future wave of microsystems innovation, DARPA has selected 11 organizations to begin work on the Next-Generation Microelectronics Manufacturing (NGMM) program. The Phase 0 effort will establish foundational research to inform next steps toward creating a domestic center for fabricating 3D heterogeneously integrated (3DHI) microsystems.

As part of DARPA's Environment-driven Conceptual Learning (ECOLE) program, several university teams and industry performers will attempt to create artificial intelligence (AI) agents capable of continually learning from linguistic and visual input. Resulting agents would be able to collaborate with humans to help them produce analyses of image, video, and multimedia documents during time-sensitive analytical tasks for national security, where reliability and robustness are essential.

Knowledge curation involves acquiring information from many sources; triaging it as unimportant, contextual, or actionable; identifying factors and causal links; finding associated datasets; and developing metrics with which to measure objectives. Despite being a vital step in the decision-making process, knowledge curation is usually done by hand, which means analysts and decision-makers often miss important factors in complicated socioeconomic systems. DARPA's Collaborative Knowledge Curation (CKC) Advanced Research Concepts (ARC) opportunity solicits ideas to explore the following question: How can we partially automate knowledge curation to help analysts and decision-makers gain and maintain awareness in complicated, interdependent systems?

Today, troops around the world can leverage troves of data at their fingertips, including at the tactical edge. That access marks an important step forward for warfighter technology, but to maximize decision-making at speed, these data volumes require granular, high-speed processing at their points of collection. High-performance computing relies heavily on internal microelectronics. Going forward, breakthrough performance will be driven by 3D heterogeneously integrated (3DHI) technologies that stack separately manufactured components, containing different semiconductors and materials, within a single package.

Rare Earth Elements (REEs) are used in a range of products and manufacturing processes - including permanent magnets, catalysts, fiber optics, and phosphor displays - critical to wind turbines, cell phones, and electric vehicles, among other modern technologies. REEs comprise 17 elements, including scandium, yttrium, and the lanthanide series. REE extraction, separation, and purification from a complex feedstock can be environmentally degrading, energy inefficient, and difficult to permit in the United States.

DARPA has selected two industry-led and two university-led teams for the Neural Evidence Aggregation Tool (NEAT) program. NEAT seeks to provide clinicians with new information to save warfighters' lives. Rather than rely solely on subjective self-report questionnaires for screening, NEAT will attempt to provide mental health professionals with objective biomarkers of suicidality. These biomarkers consist of extremely fast automatic brain and body responses reflecting pre-attentional processing rather than consciously filtered subjective responses to questions. The ultimate program goal is to reverse the tragic trend of suicide among military members and veterans by giving clinicians a more reliable screening tool for early detection of suicidality.

DARPA's new Synthetic Hemo-technologIEs that Locate & Disinfect (SHIELD) program aims to develop broad, preventive treatments for warfighters who suffer trauma from gunshot or blast wounds, or burns. Novel therapies would be administered as combat casualty care post-trauma with the aim to bind, clear, and defeat any fungi and bacteria in a pathogen-agnostic, or broad-spectrum manner before they can become a health risk. These therapies will be designed to protect the recipient for up to a week with a single dose; be durable, non-toxic, rapidly and broadly deployable; and be effective against the many different known and emerging bacterial and fungal threats.