DARPA seeking proposals for OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics program

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is seeking proposals for the fourth swarm sprint in its OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program.

“With OFFSET, we are expanding the tactics available to warfighters, leveraging advances in autonomous systems to address complex challenges in urban environments,” Timothy Chung, program manager in DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office (TTO), said. “Exploring and developing swarm technologies in virtual environments today can yield insights and impact for real-world breakthrough capabilities tomorrow.”

OFFSET envisions swarms of 250 collaborative autonomous systems providing critical capabilities to ground units in urban areas where challenges such as tall buildings, tight spaces and limited sight lines constrain essential communications, sensing, maneuverability, and autonomous operations.

As it relates to the first topic area, proposers will seek to develop and implement synthetic capabilities in simulation, representing potential future technologies, such as distributed “see-through-wall” sensors, passive swarm communications, or enhanced sensor/computing arrays, to enable and demonstrate novel swarm tactics.

The second topic area represents an ad hoc sprint for leveraging artificial Intelligence for accelerating swarm tactics design, for which sprinters will discover, learn and harden novel swarm tactics by applying artificial intelligence frameworks via enhancements of the OFFSET virtual environments.

Full OFFSET program details are available on the Federal Business Opportunities website, with directions to submit to this solicitation available under Amendment 5.