Software for Unmanned Sensors Required

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The expanding availability of unmanned sensor platforms, forward processing capability, and the increase in manned and unmanned teaming in the US Army require a deployed compute management environment.

Manned and unmanned teams increasingly are being deployed to capitalize on the growth in sensor assets while maintaining the adaptivity of experienced human operators. Yet while data collection assets are increasing, current processing tools do not have sufficient reasoning to adapt to new and changing information. New machine learning tools are necessary to enable the forward operator to augment and tune sensor processing and planning tools.

U.S. military researchers are asking industry to create the capability of composing software processing chains dynamically to deal with changing or unexpected situations, mission requirements, or environmental states during military operations.

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) issued a small-business solicitation for the Composable Embedded Software project.

Currently, software composability is limited to specific cases. DARPA defines a composable software environment to include work flow or processing chain design; data, process and state migration; automatic formation of ad-hoc networks using available communication equipment; etc.

DARPA wants industry to develop a distributed processing environment that supports the rapid specification and deployment of software for sensor planning, sensor processing, and sensor fusion across networked collection and processing, according to militaryaerospace.com.

To demonstrate the system capability, DARPA will test the environment in a manned and unmanned mission where new processing workflows will be designed and deployed before and during the mission.