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.

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

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

Barone Awarded DARPA I2O Taskorder

WASHINGTON, DC – June 25, 2014 – The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded Barone Consulting a 3-year task order to provide Scientific, Engineering, and Technical Assistance (SETA) to its Information Innovation Office (I2O).

“Barone Consulting is excited to continue its relationship with DARPA as we work on these exciting and innovative projects,” says Kevin Barone, president and CEO of Barone Consulting. “Our track record has shown our success in assisting with these vitally important systems that protect our military and intelligence efforts.”

DARPA aims to sustain the U.S. military’s technological dominance by creating strategic surprise for the country’s enemies. In the new task order, Barone Consulting with help DARPA I2O, the group responsible for anticipating rapid changes in military information science and software. The project will include framing, executing, and transitioning cyber, analytics, and computing research and development projects with a goal to create cutting-edge systems and technologies.

Barone Consulting has a strong history of working with DARPA’s many divisions, including I2O, to create game-changing technology and scientific advancements. They will partner with Schafer Corporation on this project.

Barone Aids in Innovative Firefighting Training

WASHINGTON, DC – May 29, 2014 – Barone Consulting today orchestrated a successful demonstration of DARPA technology for Arizona firefighters, effectively expanding the use of military technology to other public service areas.

Team members, including Barone Consulting integration architect Marshall Frith and senior consultant Scott Ponsor, used elements from the Persistent Close Air Support (PCAS) program that were tailored for the firefighting community in a program called Fire Line Advanced Situational Awareness for Handhelds (FLASH).

“To see the application of this program to areas besides the military was fascinating,” Frith says. “We’ve been working to give our troops the tools they need in battle, and to see those tools translate to firefighting was very rewarding. The applications of this program are nearly limitless.”

PCAS is a program designed for the military with a goal to use advanced digital tools to overcome troop coordination challenges. By equipping soldiers with targeted technology for situational awareness, rather than paper maps and legacy communications systems, troops can more easily stay coordinated and ahead of the enemy.

Firefighters battling wildfires face similar challenges to troops in battle, including the need for situational awareness, precise coordination, and ensured safety from quickly moving and shifting flames. Advanced technology to fight these problems has not been readily available to most rural firefighters, until the aid of DARPA and PCAS.

FLASH, the firefighter version of PCAS, uses tablets, aircraft-mounted sensors and radios designed to identify the location of every firefighter and aircraft in expansive fire zones. The systems overlays multiple streams of information onto a digital map visible on tablet computers. In essence, FLASH gives every member of the firefighting team a real-time map of the flames and their resources, allowing them to more easily plan where the next attack will be.

During the three-day training demonstration with the Prescott Fire Department, firefighters were able to track each other’s positions with the help of an observation aircraft that provided a live, bird’s-eye view of the terrain. Frith worked with local fire officials to demonstrate and train on the tablet software and communications program. Ponsor facilitated a virtual connection, allowing participants in the Arizona command post and in DARPA headquarters in Virginia to view the event in real time.

“This technology is incredibly powerful,” Ponsor says. “Its ability to not only unite firefighters in troubling rural situations but to bring together people across the country is remarkable. It was an honor to be part of such a project.”

Members of the Prescott Fire Department, who were chosen for the exercise because of the heroic action of the 19 firefighters who gave their lives in the Yarnell Hill wildfire last year, were impressed with FLASH technology and hopeful the devices could be tailored for other areas, such as search and rescue efforts.

http://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2014-06-09

BLADE Phase 2, Completes Test & Evaluation Program

Washington, DC (February 18, 2014) Barone Consulting, as the technical SETA support to the DARPA BLADE Program, successfully executed the Phase 2 Test & Evaluation activities which culminated in the selection of Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Lab in Cherry Hill, NJ as the Phase 3 performer.