Phase 2 of DARPA’s Spectrum Collaboration Challenge raises the bar for Collaborative Intelligent Radios

As teams gear up for Phase 2 of the Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2), Barone Consulting is providing infrastructure development and essential support.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

APRIL 10, 2018—Plans are well underway for Phase 2 of DARPA’s (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2), with Barone Consulting working with DARPA to make the research problem more challenging and to enhance the scenarios, radio frequency (RF) emulation systems and scoring approach to spur greater collaboration.

Ten finalists from Phase 1 are moving up to Phase 2, while interested contenders are working on the Phase 2 hurdle—creating a machine learning enabled, software-defined radio system that can successfully move data across a simulated, virtual RF environment the; the design of which was overseen by Barone Consulting. Contestant designs are due on April 30.

SC2 is addressing a growing problem: the shortage of radio frequency bandwidth available to support the growing number of connected devices, from home computers to cell phones to soldiers on the battlefield, using these same frequencies to transverse the wireless communications highway.

“One of the problems in today’s radio spectrum, is that often two devices are trying to use the same frequency, but they aren’t able to function, due to their mutual interference,” explains Craig Pomeroy, senior consultant at Barone Consulting. “This is what happened when Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, two wireless technologies, became widely available. The goal of SC2 is for teams to make use of machine learning techniques to enable their devices to automatically figure out how to interoperate. This interoperability will massively increase the available usable spectrum for future services like the Internet of Things.”

As part of Phase 2, Barone Consulting is working with SC2 vendors to move beyond canonical RF problems and into real world sharing problems modeled on commercial and DoD spectrum users. This involves scaling up the size of networks and network interactions and retooling the scoring approach to ensure desired outcomes are rewarded; incumbent radio systems are protected, and to incentivize collaboration between networks when opportunities exist. “During Phase 1, we wanted the teams to develop a solid radio system that was fast and able to move lots of data,” says Pomeroy. “For this phase, we want the teams, like their radios, to work more closely and leverage efficiencies that can be achieved through collaboration.” Underpinning this effort, teams are developing intelligent reasoning engines, which rely on a shared collaboration language being developed by Barone and the teams.

After all the teams secure their spots, they will have until December 2018 to complete their designs, which will compete at SC2’s Second Preliminary Event at the end of the year. Winners of the Second Preliminary Event will advance to the final phase of competition in 2019, culminating in a Championship Event. The first-place winner of that event will receive a prize of $2 million; the second-place winner, $1 million; and the third-place winner, $750,00.

The programs Championship Event will be held in conjunction with the 2019 Mobile World Congress Americas annual conference and exhibition. The combined event is the result of a partnership between GSMA (the organization that represents mobile operators worldwide), and DARPA.

“Competitions like this one show how effectively research can be conducted in a results driven framework like the one Barone provides,” concludes Pomeroy. “The successes of this program can be attributed to the hard work of both the competitor teams developing the technology, and the government teams providing the infrastructure necessary to bring disparate research together in a way never before possible.”

About Barone Consulting

With an emphasis in areas such as autonomous systems, electronic warfare, big data, geointelligence, and cloud computing, Barone Consulting provides support to America’s leading scientists and engineers with a mission of tackling the toughest problems faced by the Department of Defense. Barone Consulting is a subcontractor to ECS for this effort.

Barone Consulting is actively recruiting and encourages strong candidates with Top Secret security clearances, systems integration, flight test, and aeronautical engineering to contact us regarding DARPA opportunities.

Information about Barone Consulting can be found at www.barone.net

Revolutionizing U.S. Command of Space, the Next Military Frontier

With assistance from Barone Consulting teamed with Schafer a Belcan Company, DARPA’s Hallmark Program enters Phase 1, awarding contracts to eleven companies that are transforming how commanders manage space-based assets.

In shear volume, the Earth’s operational space domain dwarfs the oceans. Throw in thousands of objects hurtling at 17,000 miles per hour, and you have a situational-awareness and command-and-control nightmare. Given that complexity—and the growing importance of protecting U.S. space assets—DARPA, aided by Barone Consulting teamed with Schafer a Belcan Company, is developing a breakthrough approach known as Hallmark for the rapid acquisition and development of capabilities in this critical domain. In 2017, the Agency successfully completed initial research demonstrations for the Hallmark program and awarded Phase One contracts to eleven companies.

The ultimate goal of Hallmark is to arm U.S. commanders with new technologies for rapidly planning, assessing, and executing military operations in space. Hallmark is particularly innovative for being both a set of technologies and a framework, or “software testbed,” for developing new technologies to meet future challenges. The key to this agility and adaptability is ongoing, behind-the-scenes simulation and forecasting.

During the research demonstrations, military space operators worked through hypothetical scenarios involving U.S. space assets and evaluated what kinds of software tools and operating environments would be most useful in each case. The goal for each scenario: Chart only the most useful data path through a near-infinite cloud of inputs.

Hallmark is taking a multi-pronged approach to its research. The Agency has awarded Phase One contracts for the Hallmark Software Testbed (Hallmark-ST) to two teams. Hallmark-ST aims to build an advanced enterprise software architecture to facilitate a testbed for tools that will integrate a full spectrum of real-time space-domain systems and capabilities. The testbed would be used to develop a comprehensive set of new and improved technologies that can be spun off into near-term operational use.

Hallmark is also developing its first set of technologies to run through the testbeds. DARPA has awarded Phase One contracts for the Hallmark Tools, Capabilities, and Evaluation Methodology (Hallmark-TCEM) research thrust to eight organizations.

DARPA has awarded a second set of Hallmark-TCEM Phase One contracts to two teams to perform cognitive evaluation of the testbeds, tools, and technologies. By using cognitive evaluation, DARPA aims to help improve decision making by showing whether information has been effectively conveyed to operators, whether operators have been properly assigned tasks that contribute to understanding the situation, and whether given tools facilitate their ability to act on that information.

Subject Matter Experts from Barone Consulting will continue to provide technical SETA support to DARPA as the Hallmark program enters its next phase. Barone Consulting excels in test planning, management, and execution for command and control research projects like Hallmark.

About Barone Consulting

Founded in 2009, Barone Consulting provides technical assistance and systems engineering services to the Department of Defense and the intelligence community.

DARPA Awards Reusable Hypersonic Aircraft Engine Development Contracts with Help from Barone Consulting

With the help of Barone Consulting, DARPA has awarded recently awarded contracts to Aerojet Rocketdyne and Orbital ATK for the Advanced Full Range Engine (AFRE) program.

The AFRE program aims to develop and demonstrate a new, full-scale, fully-reusable aircraft propulsion system that can operate over the full range of speeds required to enable future hypersonic aircraft platforms. (Aircraft are considered to be hypersonic when flying at speeds of Mach 5 or faster.) AFRE will explore a turbine-based combined cycle (TBCC) engine concept, which uses a gas turbine engine for low-speed operation, and a dual-mode ramjet (DMRJ) for high-speed operations. These two flowpaths are combined through the use of a common inlet and common nozzle.

Ramjets can operate at speeds above that of a gas turbine engine because they use the forward motion of the engine to compress the air instead of using the compressor stages of a gas turbine engine. Ramjets must slow the incoming air down to subsonic speeds before adding fuel and burning to produce thrust. A scramjet (supersonic combusting ramjet) is able to operate at speeds above that of a ramjet because the while the fuel/air mixture is decelerated, it remains at supersonic speeds while burning, allowing for the aircraft to flow at speeds faster than a ramjet would allow. A dual-mode ramjet is an engine capable of operating in a ramjet-mode at lower speeds, and in a scramjet-mode at higher speeds. However, the use of the forward motion of the engine to compress incoming air means that ram-type engines cannot operate at low speeds.

The fastest speeds at which gas turbine engines can operate is below the slowest speeds DMRJs can operate. This gap in operating regimes creates a major roadblock in the development of TBCC aircraft. Thus, the AFRE program will address key technologies needed to enable the extension of the gas turbine engine and DMRJ operating regimes, permitting transition from the low speed flowpath to the high speed flowpath. This effort will culminate in an integrated freejet test of the TBCC propulsion system over the full range of speeds required for low speed take-off to hypersonic flight. The AFRE program seeks to demonstrate the viability of a single integrated propulsion system to propel future hypersonic systems into our most challenging environments.

Dr. David Rosenberg, one Barone Consulting’s senior consultants, will continue to provide technical SETA support and subject matter expertise to DARPA as the AFRE programs enters this next phase. Dr. Rosenberg’s years of experience in combustion research, optical diagnostics, propulsion testing, and aerospace engineering have been particularly valuable to the AFRE program. Dr. Rosenberg has not only been monitoring the development of TBCC components within his fields of expertise, he has also provided valuable input into the development of new propulsion concepts. Barone Consulting looks forward to our continued involvement in DARPA’s AFRE program.

About Barone Consulting

Founded in 2009, Barone Consulting, provides technical assistance and system engineering services to the Department of Defense and the intelligence community.

Information about Barone Consulting can be found at www.barone.net

Colosseum opened to hosts DARPA’s Spectrum Collaboration Challenge

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Colosseum opened to hosts DARPA’s Spectrum Collaboration Challenge

Colosseum, the most powerful emulator of radio signal environments in the world opens with Barone’s help

MAY 12, 2017 – The team at Barone Consulting is thrilled to announce that one of their latest projects, Colosseum, is providing support for DARPA’s Spectrum Collaboration Challenge.

Barone Consulting provides solutions to some of the Department of Defense’s most pressing problems by supporting the country’s leading scientists and engineers in areas including autonomous systems, electronics warfare, big data, geointelligence, and cybersecurity. Now, Barone Consulting with Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, and National Instruments has unveiled a large-scale RF testbed that is being used by DARPA to host their Spectrum Collaboration Challenge, with up to $3.75million dollars in prizes.

The Colosseum features a 256-by-256 channel RF channel emulator, giving it the ability to calculate and simulate 65,000+ channel interactions among 256 wireless devices in real-time. Each second, more than 52 terabytes of digital RF data flows through the Colosseum. This is more information held in the Library of Congress’ entire print collection.

DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) works to make technological breakthroughs for the benefit of national security, a mission that has been in the making since 1957. With the launch of Colosseum, DARPA is taking another great stride towards automating the wireless communications world by creating this massive emulation environment.

“Creating Colosseum is just the first step.” says President Kevin Barone, “The biggest reward will be seeing the 30 Spectrum Collaboration Challenge teams use this platform to develop next generation artificial intelligence enabled radio systems that will fundamentally change the way we use the RF spectrum. Colosseum will help usher in a wireless future where unimaginably rich information experiences are the norm.”

During the competition, SC2 competitors will work to create innovative radio systems that will have the capability to learn from each other in real-time. Achieving such success in the realm of radio-based artificial intelligence will render radio specifications obsolete. Colosseum is being described as a “path-breaking testbed” that will be able to emulate tens of thousands of interactions between wireless communication devices such as military radios, cell phones, internet-of-things devices, and more in a single square-kilometer area.

One especially unique component of the design has been integrating software defined radio technology and a cloud-like computing environment that is remotely accessible by teams. Placing a resource of this scale onto the cloud will be a first-in-the-world achievement.

Barone Consulting looks forward to continuing their DARPA support of SC2 over the next 3 years to advance how artificial intelligence can create solutions for a multitude of wireless communications challenges.

According to DARPA, “The Colosseum is a magnificent electronic arena and just what we and the SC2 teams need for testing innovative, collaborative, intelligent radios against one another.”

More information can be found at http://baronedc.com.

About Barone Consulting

With an emphasis in areas such as autonomous systems, electronics warfare, big data, geointelligence, and cybersecurity, Barone Consulting provides support to America’s leading scientists and engineers with a mission of tackling the toughest problems faced by the Department of Defense.

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Barone Consulting Aids DARPA in Development of Reusable Hypersonic Aircraft

The next step on the road to reusable hypersonic aircraft capable of taking off from a runway, flying to hypersonic speeds, and then landing back on a runway is the development of combined systems that utilize gas turbine engines to reach supersonic speeds, and engines such as scramjets to reach hypersonic speeds. Barone Consulting provides Subject Matter Experts to DARPA’s Advanced Full Range Engine (AFRE) Program. The goal of the AFRE Program is the development, testing, and vehicle integration of these turbine-based combined cycle (TBCC) engines.

The AFRE program aims to develop and test key technologies, resulting in the ground-based testing of a full-scale, integrated system. If successful, these systems may be flight-tested in a future follow-on program.

About Barone Consulting
Founded in 2009, Barone Consulting, provides technical assistance and system engineering services to the Department of Defense and the intelligence community.

Information about Barone Consulting can be found at www.barone.net

Barone Consulting to provide technical support to DARPA Gremlins Program

DARPA has placed four companies on contract for the first phase of the Gremlins program, which will explore inexpensive unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in volley quantities to saturate enemy defenses. The Gremlins program will employ a modified C-130 aircraft to launch the UAVs, which will then communicate their behavior for electronic attack and reconnaissance missions from standoff ranges. Upon the completion of their mission they will then aerially recover surviving drones for refueling and reuse. The four companies will design UAVs that are inexpensive when compared to other autonomous weapon systems, so that occasional losses would not compromise the overall mission. The program aims to develop affordable UAVs that could be reused as many as 20 times for dangerous missions in contested air space such as pre-attack reconnaissance and surveillance, as well as electronic attack to destroy or disable enemy communications, missile defenses, and battlefield networks. These UAVs would be capable of employing diverse payloads in volley quantities, and would have the advantages of small vehicle size, reusability, and limited vehicle design life.

Barone Consulting is very proud and excited to be part of this groundbreaking effort, which promises to make a fundamental shift in the notion of aerial attack. SETA consultants from Barone Consulting will be advising the government program leadership on the proposed technical approaches of the four companies. Barone brings experience in unmanned aerial vehicles, airborne network management, autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. We will be advising program management on these areas as well and providing programmatic support for execution of the Phase 1 contracts.

The program is named in homage to the 1948 XF-85 Goblin aircraft, which was developed as a fighter capable of deploying from and recovering to a strategic bomber to provide escort counter air capabilities (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_XF-85_Goblin). Ultimately the Goblin program was abandoned due to XF-85’s shortcomings against other fighter aircraft and the high degree of difficulty in reconnecting the fighter with its carrier/bomber aircraft. The Gremlins program recognizes the inherent difficulty with aerial recovery of an autonomous aircraft, but will capitalize on technological advances of the last 50 years. With that said, recovering an UAV from a C-130 in flight is still understood to be “DARPA Hard”.

DARPA is pursuing the Gremlins program in three phases: system and technology design; preliminary design; and prototype flight demonstration.

This first phase of the program is expected to spend about $15.8 million among the four separate contractors. Ultimately DARPA wants a Gremlins flight demonstration by early 2020 to show the feasibility and potential of air-launched, recoverable unmanned aircraft.

Information about Barone Consulting can be found at www.baronedc.com

The original DARPA press release can be found at http://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2015-08-28.

About Barone Consulting

Founded in 2009, Barone Consulting provides system engineering and technical assistance services to the Department of Defense and the intelligence community. To find out more, please visit www.baronedc.com

DARPA Announces Next Grand Challenge – Spectrum Collaboration Challenge

On March 23rd, 2016 DARPA announced its next Grand Challenge at the International Wireless Conference Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada. Program Manager, Paul Tilghman of DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office (MTO), made the announcement to industry leaders following the conferences Dynamic Spectrum Sharing Summit. The challenge will motivate a machine learning approach to dynamically sharing the RF Spectrum and has been named the “Spectrum Collaboration Challenge.” A top prize of $2million dollars has been announced.

While mostly transparent to the typical cell phone or Wi-Fi user, the problem of spectrum congestion has been a long standing issue for both the commercial sector and Department of Defense. The insatiable appetite for wireless connectivity over the last 30 years has grown at such a hurried pace that within the RF community the term spectrum scarcity has been coined. RF bandwidth, the number of frequencies available to communicate information over, is a relatively fixed resource, and advanced communication systems like LTE and military communications systems consume a lot of it. As spectrum planners prepare for the next big wave of connected devices, dubbed the Internet of Things, they wonder where they will find the spectrum bandwidth they need to support these billions of new devices. Equally challenging, is the military’s desire to connect every soldier on the battlefield, while using these very same frequencies.

DARPA has chosen Barone Consulting to help develop the Spectrum Collaboration Challenge to address these critical infrastructure and military operation needs. In the tradition of other DARPA Grand Challenges, the Spectrum Collaboration Challenge provides an opportunity for experts across a wide variety of disciplines to devise groundbreaking strategies and systems and compete in open competition to win prizes, while advancing the state-of-the-art and seeding new technology communities. For the Spectrum Collaboration Challenge, the tasks are to combine distributed sensing techniques, innovative RF transmit and receive technologies, and cutting edge machine learning algorithms to create radio networks capable of learning to collaborate with other unknown radio networks, in real time.

While working the problem of spectrum scarcity with DARPA, Paul Tilghman and Barone Consulting president Kevin Barone identified numerous shortcomings in conventional, human based spectrum planning techniques, which introduce significant inefficiencies into the allocation and reuse of frequency assignments. The realization that only the radios themselves have sufficient situational awareness of the RF environment surrounding them to be able to make transmitter and receiver assignments efficiently, combined with limited insight into the interference one radio exposes to another, dramatically reduces the number of options available to a spectrum planner. Considering that oftentimes spectrum planning occurs months, and sometimes years ahead of the radios’ actual use, it became clear that only by moving the planning process into the radio itself, could true real-time spectrally optimized solutions be realized.

Barone Consulting is very proud and excited to be part of this groundbreaking effort, which promises to revolutionize how spectrum is managed, while unleashing underutilized RF resources to the advantage of the commercial and military user. As we continue our work executing this program and overseeing the development of these new systems, we look forward to getting to know the teams and the remarkable technologies they will be developing.

Barone Consulting is actively recruiting and encourages strong candidates with Top Secret security clearances, systems integration, RF, machine learning, and national test bed experience to contact us regarding DARPA opportunities.

Information about Barone Consulting can be found at www.baronedc.com

Information about the Spectrum Collaboration Challenge can be found at www.spectrumcollaborationchallenge.com

The original DARPA press release can be found at www.darpa.mil/news-events/2016-03-23

About Barone Consulting

Founded in 2009, Barone Consulting provides system engineering and technical assistance services to the Department of Defense and the intelligence community. They provide a cadre of elite subject matter experts to the government in support of game-changing, cutting edge technologies that help performers bridge the “valley of death” between R&D and fielded tactically relevant products. To find out more, please visit www.baronedc.com

Barone Consulting provides the experience critical to the success of DARPA’s Dynamic Battle Management program.

In February of 2014 the Strategic Technology Office within the Defense Advanced Research Program Agency decided to make a considerable investment to improve the DoD’s airborne battle management capability. Envisioned and managed by Dr. Craig Lawrence the program aimed to drastically improve the time critical situational awareness and decision-making tools utilized by Command and Control (C2) operators. To accomplish this the program, named “Dynamic Battle Management”, brought along the unique talents of Colonel Richard “Scotty” Wright (USAF Retired) from Barone Consulting to ensure they had a proper understanding of the challenges facing command and control operators.

All branches of the DoD have uniquely trained C2 operators. Key among them are the Air Battle Managers within the USAF who employ the E-3 Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) and the Naval Flight Officers of the US Navy’s E-2 Hawkeye fleet. These operators often describe their job as “performing air traffic control while people are shooting at each other”. Air Battle Managers and NFOs use a complex web of sensors, digital data links and voice radios to ensure the mission success of the US and coalition aircraft employed in military operations around the world. As C2 aircraft have modernized their sensors and data-links, their operators have become swarmed with the data available to them. The challenge of utilizing the data available form radar, air traffic control signals, and electronic warfare sensors on all networked aircraft is exactly what Dynamic Battle Management aims to solve.

DARPA has contracted with Lockheed Martin and Raytheon as key integrators for the program. They are developing mission planning, control, and situational understanding algorithms to enhance the C2 operator’s capabilities. Additionally they are researching the design of human-machine interfaces to make the operators more effective. Following this the Dynamic Battle Management team will build an integrated capability to manage air-to-air and air-to-ground combat and demonstrate that capability in large-scale simulation and live fly events. Fortunately for the program, Barone Consulting was available to guide them with subject matter expertise on these critical missions and technologies.

First successful integration of the PCAS system with an MV-22 tilt-rotor aircraft

Meet the Successful Consulting Team behind DARPA’s PCAS Latest Demonstration

They worked in the shadows providing testing and technical assistance to DARPA for the PCAS weapon test.

Barone Consulting is proud to announce the successful completion of a networked Persistent Close Air Support (PCAS) combat capabilities test on an MV-22 tilt-rotor aircraft. Two members of Barone Consulting, Marshall Frith and Scott Ponsor, were actively involved in the system integration and test of the PCAS program, which came to a successful completion on 27^th March.

The demonstration, which took place in the southwest region of the United States, marked the first successful integration of the PCAS system within a USMC aircraft. Right from the planning to the execution, the demonstration was a big success that wouldn’t have been possible without the teamwork of every person involved.

PCAS, which is the brainchild of Defense Advanced Research Program Agency (DARPA), is an improvement on the existing close air support capabilities (CAS). Unlike CAS, which relies heavily on voice instructions and paper maps, PCAS leverages advances in computing and communication technologies to deliver reliable coordination between ground forces and aircrews.

In creating PCAS, DARPA envisions an all-digital close air support system. The system constitutes of two main components: PCAS-Air and PCAS-Ground.

PCAS-Air consists of a GPS enabled system that uses high-speed internet connections and sophisticated algorithms that are able to calculate the optimal path to the target as well as recommend the best weapon to deploy once the targeted is identified and selected.

PCAS-Ground, a suite of situational awareness and mapping software on Android tablet computer. Information can also be visualized using a HUD eyepiece that displays imagery, maps, and other information about the target, letting the troops keep their eyes on the target, not the tablets. PCAS-Ground has already been put to the test in Afghanistan, where it quickly proved a significant success. The units in Afghanistan replaced paper maps with PCAS-Ground and reported increased and improved agility as well as precise coordinate air engagements.

PCAS not only makes Close Air Support prompt and precise but also enables the employment of small munitions, something which greatly reduce collateral damage.

The successful prototyping of PCAS on the MV-22 tilt-rotor aircraft opens doors to a larger discussion on modern CAS within the Department of Defense. Barone Consulting, which is one of the most remarkable systems engineering and technical assistance firms in the United States, hopes to play a crucial role in the future advancement of the PCAS program.

About Barone Consulting
Founded in 2009, Barone Consulting, provides technical assistance and system engineering services to the Department of Defense and the intelligent community. They offer a cadre of elite subject matter experts to the government in support of game-changing, cutting edge technologies.

PCAS scores success with USMC leadership

Marshall Frith and Scott Ponsor have been working on DARPA’s PCAS project which has just recently completed a weapons demonstration for the MV-22 tiltrotor aircraft. The program has lead to several transitioning technologies and has opened a larger discussion of modern CAS technology within the DoD.

On March 27, DARPA successfully tested the full PCAS prototype system for the first time as part of TALON REACH, a U.S. Marine Corps infantry/aviation training exercise conducted in the southwest region of the United States in partnership with the Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics Squadron One and the Marine Infantry Officer Course (IOC). The demonstration marked the first successful integration of automated, digital, real-time coordination capability into a military aircraft system, including rail-launched munitions, digital data links and advanced software in support of ground forces.“I am very pleased with the successful PCAS demonstration that we had during TALON REACH,” said Lt. Gen. Jon M. Davis, the Marine Corps’ deputy commandant for aviation. “I have emphasized to my team that we will network every one of our aircraft.”

http://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2015-04-06