Opportunities for Funding and/or Engagement

Scientists and engineers in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office (DSO) promote and exploit new discoveries across the frontiers of physics, chemistry, and mathematics to identify and accelerate potentially game-changing technologies for U.S. national security. After recently spinning off biological technologies into a new office, DSO’s investment portfolio, which continues to create new materials and explore the boundaries of physical phenomena, is expanding to include novel approaches to understanding, predicting, designing, and developing engineered complex systems.

The DARPA Open Catalog—a six-month-old public web portal that organizes and shares the results of DARPA research—today expanded its research listings to include peer-reviewed publications and other material from the agency’s Biological Technologies Office (BTO) and Defense Sciences Office (DSO). Along with that expansion, the website now offers open source software, peer-reviewed publications and other research materials from the majority of programs in the agency’s Information Innovation Office (I2O) that have public information to share.

Many businesses and academic researchers wishing to pursue cutting-edge research ideas with government support lack the resources to navigate the burdensome paperwork requirements required to win federal grants or contracts. DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office (BTO) has created a simplified proposal process to attract and fund new ideas from just those types of innovators—those operating at the intersection of biology and technology who may never have worked with the Defense Department and may otherwise have remained too daunted to try.

Military air operations typically rely on large, manned, robust aircraft, but such missions put these expensive assets—and their pilots—at risk. While small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) can reduce or eliminate such risks, they lack the speed, range and endurance of larger aircraft. These complementary traits suggest potential benefits in a blended approach—one in which larger aircraft would carry, launch and recover multiple small UAS. Such an approach could greatly extend the range of UAS operations, enhance overall safety, and cost-effectively enable groundbreaking capabilities for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and other missions.

DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office (TTO) seeks to preserve and extend decisive advantages for the U.S. military through innovative systems or systems components that incorporate new or emerging technologies. To help accomplish these goals, TTO has scheduled a TTO Proposers Day at DARPA’s offices in Arlington, Va., to be held on Wednesday, April 29, 2015, and Thursday, April 30, 2015, at which potential performers can learn more about TTO’s technical objectives. Those objectives will be outlined in detail in advance of the Proposers Day in a Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) calling for executive summaries, white papers and proposals for advanced research, development and demonstration of innovative systems for military missions.