DARPA awards contracts for Phase 2 of CODE program

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Collaborative Operations in Denied Environment (CODE) program awarded Phase 2 system integration contracts on Monday to two companies, with six other companies collaborating on the project.

The two awardees included Lockheed Martin Corporation and the Raytheon Company, while the six collaborating companies, all of which had Phase 1 contracts with DARPA, included Daniel H. Wagner Associates; Scientific Systems Company, Inc.; Smart Information Flow Technologies LLC; Soar Technology, Inc.; SRI International; and Vencore Labs, doing business as Applied Communication Sciences.

The CODE program seeks to assist the U.S. military’s unmanned aircraft system (UAS) conduct dynamic, long-distance engagements of highly mobile ground and maritime targets in denied or contested electromagnetic airspace, all while reducing required communications bandwidth and cognitive burden on human supervisors. The project’s main objective, however, will be to develop and demonstrate the value of collaborative autonomy where UASs could perform sophisticated tasks both individually and in teams under the supervision of a single human mission commander.

“During Phase 1, we successfully demonstrated, in simulation, the potential value of collaborative autonomy among UASs at the tactical edge, and worked with our performers to draft transition plans for possible future operational systems,” DARPA Program Manager Jean-Charles Ledé said. “Between the two teams, we have selected about 20 autonomous behaviors that would greatly increase the mission capabilities of our legacy UASs and enable them to perform complex missions in denied or contested environments in which communications, navigation, and other critical elements of the targeting chain are compromised. We have also made excellent progress in the human-system interface and open-architecture framework.”