On January 22, the Air Force Research
Laboratory (AFRL) updated its Decentralized Classification and Coordination
with Non-Permissive Communications broad agency announcement (BAA). AFRL
recommends that white papers be submitted by June 30 for FY21 funding.
The Air Force Research Laboratory’s
Information Directorate is seeking innovative solutions to research, develop,
and evaluate technologies/techniques to enable multiple systems to coordinate
and identify entities of interest when communications are constrained.
The Information Directorate of the
Air Force Research Laboratory is soliciting white papers under this Broad
Agency Announcement (BAA) for research, development, and evaluation of
technologies/techniques to enable multiple systems to coordinate and identify
entities of interest when communications are constrained. Specifically, the
technical focus will be on performing decentralized multi-sensor classification
and multi-agent coordination under variable communications conditions.
There is an increasing demand for
unmanned systems to perform a wide range of Air Force missions. This demand is
evidenced by the rapid development of small-unmanned air systems (SUAS) that
are intended to reduce acquisitions cost and provide an affordance for the loss
of aircraft during missions. While these new platforms provide the potential
for revolutionary capability, relatively limited research has been done on how
these SUAS will autonomously and collaboratively conduct a wide range of
missions without careful engineering for a single purpose.
The use of SUAS for autonomous
operations introduces new technical challenges that are not evident on the
majority of existing platforms with permissive reach-back communications that
the Government uses to conduct today’s missions. With reduced size comes more
restrictive payload weights, limiting the number and diversity of sensors that
can be located on a single platform. As a result, platforms must coordinate to
share and leverage multi-sensor data over limited communications channels.
Additionally, the SUAS must coordinate their actions and scale appropriately to
the number and diversity of tasks that are necessary to complete a mission.
Efforts are categorized into four technical
areas (TAs), each focusing on a different aspect of collecting information and
classifying entities under non-permissive communications. Offerors may submit
offers on any technical area individually or any combination of technical
areas. Offerors who include multiple technical areas in their proposal should
describe the work for each technical area separately and clearly identify the
applicable TAs.
The technical areas are as follows:
TA1: Decentralized, On-Device
Classification
TA2: Multi-Agent Planning for
Self-Orchestrating Collectives
TA3: Dynamic Network Management
TA4: Scalable Simulation
Full information is available here.
Source: SAM
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