Category: 2016

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.

 

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.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