Twelve teams have qualified for the DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge Virtual Competition Final Event, to be held September 21-24, where $1.5-million of prizes are at stake. Their algorithms will guide virtual versions of real robots as they drive or fly through unfamiliar simulated underground courses and locate items of interest such as injured survivors, cell phones, backpacks, and even hazardous gas ..read more

Rare Earth Elements (REEs) are a group of 17 similar metals that are critical material components of many DoD systems, including lasers, precision-guided weapons, magnets for motors, and other devices.1 Although the U.S. has adequate domestic REE resources, its supply chain is vulnerable due to dependence on foreign entities for separation and purification of these elements. "Biomining," an approach that uses microbes to extract or separate target metals like gold or copper from a variety of sources is not yet useful for REEs because of poor specificity and selectivity of the microbes for REE ..read more

DARPA has selected four industry and university research teams for the Invisible Headlights program, which seeks to determine if it's possible for autonomous vehicles to navigate in complete darkness using only passive sensors ..read more

DARPA successfully deployed two satellites on June 30 as part of the SpaceX Transporter 2 launch. Both Mandrake 2 spacecraft, Able and Baker, are functioning well and progressing through checkout and commissioning. Conceived as an early risk-reduction flight for DARPA's Blackjack program, the Mandrake 2 mission will prove out advanced laser communications technologies for a broad government stakeholder team that includes DARPA, Space Development Agency (SDA), Air Force Research Laboratory Space Vehicles Directorate (AFRL/RV), and Office of the Secretary of Defense's (OSD) Joint Capability Tec ..read more

DARPA today announced that three teams of researchers led by Raytheon, BAE Systems, and Northrop Grumman have been selected to develop event-based infrared (IR) camera technologies under the Fast Event-based Neuromorphic Camera and Electronics (FENCE) program. Event-based - or neuromorphic - cameras are an emerging class of sensors with demonstrated advantages relative to traditional imagers. These advanced models operate asynchronously and only transmit information about pixels that have changed. This means they produce significantly less data and operate with much lower latency and power ..read more

Last year, DARPA conducted its first bug bounty program - the Finding Exploits to Thwart Tampering (FETT) Bug Bounty - to evaluate hardware protections in development on the System Security Integration Through Hardware and firmware (SSITH) program. SSITH is exploring hardware security architectures and tools that protect electronic systems against common classes of hardware vulnerabilities exploited through software, with the goal of breaking the endless cycle of software patch-and-pray ..read more

In this episode of the Voices from DARPA podcast, Alexander (Xander) Walan, a program manager since 2017 in the agency's Tactical Technology Office, pegs the source of his lifelong fascination with aircraft and flight to the Chicago Air and Water Shows his dad took him and his four siblings to when they were children. At DARPA, he has applied that interest, his training in aeronautical engineering, a 22-year career in the Air Force overseeing some 70 technology-development programs, and an MBA, to his oversight of programs featuring DARPA's signature audacity ..read more

Following recent successful experimentation with Marines at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, DARPA's Prototype Resilient Operations Testbed for Expeditionary Urban Scenarios (PROTEUS) will transition to the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory (MCWL) in Quantico, Virginia ..read more

DARPA's Operational Fires (OpFires) program, which is developing and demonstrating new technologies for ground-launched medium-range hypersonic weapons, successfully completed full-scale static test firing of a unique second stage propulsion system. This high-performance, solid-fuel "throttleable" rocket motor can be turned off before burning through all of its fuel, potentially allowing a missile to hit targets located anywhere within a medium-range continuum ..read more

A challenge for the military, whose members change duty stations every few years and deploy regularly, is ensuring efficient and effective knowledge handover during transitions. Currently, the transfer of key organizational task information and understanding of unique local issues is largely ad hoc: onboarding briefings, right-seat/left-seat rides, conversations, knowledge management (KM) databases, lessons learned reports, turnover folders, emails, and even handwritten notes - all of which require time-consuming manual collection, maintenance, and dissemination that are prone to gaps ..read more