Creating and Preventing Strategic Surprise
Our Work Banner
Robotics Challenge

Radio Gateway Connects U.S. and Allied Troops to a Common Mobile Network

MAINGATE_72_72
Multinational forces, U.S. government agencies and U.S. troops operating together in forward-deployed locations generally have problems communicating—and not just due to language differences. Technical incompatibility between communications systems can hinder information sharing and timely command and control decisions. DARPA’s Mobile Ad hoc Interoperability Network Gateway (MAINGATE) program is helping overcome this technology barrier. The program is nearing completion and plans to transfer the latest version of the system to Army warfighters still engaged in Afghanistan, but who are now focused more on Force Protection as U.S. forces draw down. The MAINGATE system is providing insights into tactical networking of the future, where systems will need more adaptability and capability. The system is packaged in a way that provides real-world capabilities like no other existing system.   News Release  
MAINGATE_145_4335
SST Web Feature 12-6-2013 144

SST Australia: Signed, Sealed and Ready for Delivery

SST Web Feature 12-6-2013 72 

As satellites become more common, they face growing risk of colliding with space debris and even each other. The U.S. Department of Defense has thus made space situational awareness a top priority to maintain communication, Earth observation and other critical capabilities upon which military, civilian and commercial functions rely. Traditional telescope technology, however, has difficulty finding and tracking small objects—such as debris and satellites—across wide tracks of sky, especially at the increasingly crowded geosynchronous orbits roughly 22,000 miles above the Earth’s surface.   News Release 

Moire Web Feature 1 12-5-2013 144

First Folding Space Telescope Aims to “Break the Glass Ceiling” of Traditional Designs

DARPA’s Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) will move from the mountains of New Mexico to Western Australia (above), under a recent Memorandum of Understanding between the United States and Australia. From the SST’s new home, its Australian operators the SST will feed the information the system captures to the Space Surveillance Network (SSN), a U.S. Air Force program charged with cataloguing and observing space objects to identify potential near-term collisions with space assets. The telescope will also keep providing deep space surveillance data for small asteroid detection to NASA and the scientific community. 

The capability of orbital telescopes to see wide swaths of the earth at a time has made them indispensable for key national security responsibilities such as weather forecasting, reconnaissance and disaster response. Even as telescope design has advanced, however, one aspect has remained constant since Galileo: using glass for lenses and mirrors, also known as optics. High-resolution imagery traditionally has required large-diameter glass mirrors, which are thick, heavy, difficult to make and expensive. As the need for higher-resolution orbital imagery expands, glass mirrors are fast approaching the point where they will be too large, heavy and costly for even the largest of today’s rockets to carry to orbit.   News Release   Program Page 

DRC Web Feature 1 12-2-2013 144

Seventeen Teams Qualify to Participate in DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials

Team KAIST (Daejeon, South Korea) 

Four teams that built full robot hardware and software systems using their own funds qualified to join 13 other teams to compete in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Robotics Challenge (DRC) Trials. The event will take place Dec. 20 and 21 at the Homestead-Miami Speedway in Homestead, Fla., where spectators can observe as the robots are tested on the capabilities that would enable them to provide assistance in future natural and man-made disasters.  News Release   Program Website 

CSFV Web Feature 12-4-2013 144

Verigames Portal Offers the Chance to Do Serious IT Security While Playing Online

DARPA’s Crowd Sourced Formal Verification (CSFV) program developed and launched its Verigames web portal. Verigames offers free online games to help with formal verification, which confirms the absence of certain software flaws or bugs. CSFV aims to investigate whether large numbers of non-experts can perform formal verification faster and more cost-effectively than conventional processes. 

Ever more sophisticated cyber attacks exploit software vulnerabilities in the Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) IT systems and applications upon which military, government and commercial organizations rely. The most rigorous way to thwart these attacks is formal verification, an analysis process that helps ensure that software is free from exploitable flaws and vulnerabilities. Traditional formal methods, however, require specially trained engineers to manually scour software—a process that up to now has been too slow and costly to apply beyond small software components. News Release     Program Page 

LRASM Web Feature 12-3-2013 - 144

LRASM Prototype Scores 2nd Successful Flight Test

LRASM 

An unmanned target ship demonstrates the effects of the second successful flight test of a Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) prototype, conducted November 12 off the coast of Southern California. The test reinforced the results of LRASM’s first successful free-flight transition test (FFTT) on August 27, whichverified the prototype’s flight characteristics and assessed subsystem and sensor performance. Both tests achieved all of their objectives after the prototypes used their respective onboard sensors to detect, engage and hitthe moving 260-foot target ships with inert warheads.  News Release   Program Page
Share this page: