DARPA’s DSO is seeking proposals that investigate innovative approaches that enable revolutionary advances in science, devices or systems for national security applications. This BAA seeks revolutionary research ideas for topics not being addressed by ongoing DSO programs or other published solicitations.
To avoid proposals that duplicate existing activities or are responsive to other published DSO solicitations, potential proposers are highly encouraged to review current DSO programs and solicitations, respectively listed at http://www.darpa.mil/about-us/offices/dso and http://www.darpa.mil/work-with-us/opportunities. Contacting DSO program managers to discuss their research interests is strongly encouraged. A current list of program managers is available at http://www.darpa.mil/about-us/people.
Technical Thrust Areas
- Materials, Manufacturing and Structures – breaking the tension between performance and efficiency for critical parts, production processes, energetics, superconductors and propulsion.
- Sensing, Measuring and Affecting – developing and leveraging new science to overcome existing barriers limiting the performance and/or practicality of sensing, measurement and control, to achieve orders-of-magnitude improvement in operational capabilities
- Math, Computation and Processing – enabling quantum, reimagining classical and developing entirely new forms of computing for enhanced efficiency and new capabilities. Solutions may range from new approaches to hardware (implementation) to representation and computation.
- Complex, Dynamic and Intelligent Systems – creating new scientific capabilities for classes of systems that evolve and adapt and for which traditional reductionist, data-driven and statistical methods fail. Systems of interest include, but are not limited to, foundations of intelligence, human-AI ecosystems, homeostatic mechanisms and global systems.
DSO will consider any fundamental research concept, idea, or effort that addresses DARPA’s mission to make pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for national security. Proposals in novel areas DSO has not considered are welcome.
Executive summaries, abstracts (strongly encouraged but not required) and full proposals will be accepted and assessed on a rolling basis until 2 June 2026.
Document
Broad Agency Announcement – DSO Office-Wide – HR001125S0013-Amendment-01
