DARPA News March 11, 2024 DARPA’s new Rubble to Rockets (R2) program aims to overcome current limitations to manufacturing in supply chain-denied environments by developing production and design approaches that can accommodate widely variable input materials. Performers will focus on creating an inexpensive, flexible, and robust platform for the production and characterization of raw material for use in structural fabrication. DARPA hypothesizes that the analytical framework would allow for rapid upgrades to incorporate the growing number of new material developments and fabrication methods, thus significantly reducing adoption risk that traditionally take decades to retire. An R2 Industry Day is scheduled […]
Category Archives: DARPA
Seeking Innovative Concepts for Space Superiority
DARPA News September 18, 2023 The Bringing Classified Innovation to Defense and Government Systems (BRIDGES) initiative aims to connect innovation from small companies that traditionally do not work with the U.S. government with classified Department of Defense research and development efforts. It aims to provide companies that demonstrate they can provide innovation and value to the DOD the means to obtain a facility clearance and interact directly with DOD customers at classified levels. With this topic, the agency is looking for new methods and technologies that may provide warfighters with disruptive options for protecting and defending space systems across the […]
New sensors with the HOTS for extreme missions
DARPA News May 12, 2023 The performance of many of the defense and industrial systems that rely on sensors experience harsh environments beyond the capability of today’s high-performance physical sensors, they are limited by the uncertainty of their thermal environments. Today, sensors that can withstand thermally harsh conditions are limited to low-sensitivity transducers located in hot zones coupled via noisy electrical connections to remote, temperature-constrained, silicon signal-conditioning microelectronics in cold zones. The resulting integrated sensors lack the combination of frequency bandwidth and dynamic range essential for high-temperature missions. If we can design, integrate, and demonstrate high-performance physical sensors that can […]
Developing Agile, Reliable Sensing Systems with Microbes
DARPA April 21, 2023 DARPA’s new Tellus program will explore the development of an interactive, platform methodology for the rapid design of microbe-based sense-and-respond devices for monitoring DOD-relevant environments. Specifically, DARPA seeks to establish the range of chemical and physical signals that microbial devices can detect, environmental conditions they can tolerate, and types of output signals that can be generated. They envision a dashboard or interface where a user would dial in features of their environment, the inputs they want to detect, and the output signals that are useful to them, and the system would design a safe, effective microbial […]
DARPA Unveils New Program to Recruit Early Career Scientists, Engineers
DARPA August 31, 2020 A new DARPA effort aims to recruit standout scientists and engineers beginning their careers for a two-year position at the agency. The DARPA Innovation Fellowship Program will select fellows to push the limits of existing technology through rapid exploration and analysis of a high volume of promising new ideas. The Projects will focus on answering high-risk/high-reward ‘what if?’ questions and assessing the impact of further investment on problems of importance to the Department of Defense. The fellowships are a great way for the nation’s future scientific thought leaders to have the opportunity to make extensive connections […]
DARPA Joins Public-Private Partnership to Address Challenges Facing Microelectronics Advancement
DARPA December 22, 2021 DARPA today announced its participation in a new long-term university research collaboration with the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) and a consortium of companies in the commercial semiconductor industry and the defense industrial base called the Joint University Microelectronics Program 2.0 (JUMP 2.0). The program aims to establish seven collaborative, multidisciplinary, multi-university research centers focused on supporting exploratory research with an eight- to twelve-year time horizon for transition to defense and commercial opportunities. To focus the research, each center will define an overarching challenge and a set of specific technical goals by which the center will be […]
Voices from DARPA- Episode 28: Swarm Commander
DARPA Outreach June 11, 2020 In this episode of the Voices from DARPA podcast, the Tactical Technology Office manager delves into robotics and autonomous technology programs – the Subterranean (SubT) Challenge and OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET). From robot soccer to live-fly experimentation programs involving dozens of UASs, how the programs aim to assist humans heading into unknown environments via advances in collaborative autonomy and robotics…read more.
DARPA Sets Date for Subterranean Challenge Competitors Day
DARPA July 20, 2018 The goal of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge is to discover innovative solutions to rapidly and remotely map, navigate, and search complex underground environments, including human-made tunnel systems, urban and municipal underground infrastructure, and natural cave networks. The final event, planned for 2021, will put teams to the test with a course that incorporates diverse challenges from all three environments. The winner of the systems competition will take home a $2 million prize, while the winner of the virtual competition will earn a $750,000 prize… read more. BAA