DARPA Tactical Technology Office is seeking innovative proposals for drone autonomy capability that is not tied to the specific drone hardware and is developed rapidly and flexibly enough to remain relevant in a dynamic battlefield.
REMA’s primary objectives are to enhance remotely operated group 1-3 stock commercial and military drones at the speed of relevance by
- Building a Drone Autonomy Adapter (DA2) that can detect the type of drone on its own and act as the interface to the physical drone, enabling the use of separately-developed autonomy capabilities. The DA2 may be hardware and/or software, as necessary to support the Government-specified drones or the needs of the autonomy software.
- Developing Mission-Specific Autonomy Software (MAS) to upgrade the drone from
remotely-piloted operation to autonomous mission execution using the DA2 interface. - Applying rapid software development practices for new capabilities starting at 3
month spiral intervals and accelerating to 1 month spiral intervals. - Employing a government-maintained cloud environment to provide a common secure development platform and facilitate transition to users.
The program will go for 18 months and consist of up to 15 spirals addressing specific challenge problems.
The first two spiral challenges planned are:
- Continue with reconnaissance on a preset route after being jammed, and
reestablish teleoperation. - Autonomous navigation to waypoint or cursor-selected location in video feed after
being jammed
Potential future spiral challenges include:
- Automapping of ground features such as trenches and disturbed earth
- Autonomous point-to-point flying through urban terrain
- Autonomous recon, autonomous broadcast of objects of interest
- Autonomous recon, return with stored imagery and video
- Autonomous recon and adversary distraction through repeated close approaches
Abstracts are due 3 October 2023. Selected proposers will then be invited to provide an oral presentation at the end of October.
Document
Final Program Solicitation – REMA: DARPA-PS-23-12
