SAM #DARPA-PS-27-06

DARPA Unison collaborative-autonomy software and simulation research

DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office is seeking research prototypes for Unison, a program to help autonomous teams adapt their actions and communications together during complex missions. - Government buyer: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Strategic Technology Office (STO). - Requested work: - TA-1 — Joint Co-Adaptation: Develop and evaluate software that jointly adapts autonomous agents’ plans and communications during mission execution. Support teams of 10–100 unmanned systems, missions lasting 30 minutes to 6 hours, and communications rates of 100 bps to 1 Kbps; includes five progressive test events across two phases. - TA-2 — Modeling and Simulation Environment: Develop a scalable, faster-than-real-time environment to train, integrate, evaluate, and stress-test TA-1 solutions. Support 10–200 agents, execution at least 100 times real time, repeatable evaluations, relevant simulation fidelity, disrupted/degraded/intermittent/limited (DDIL) communications modeling, and black-box API integration. - Illustrative scenario: Search and rescue with 2 unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) and 8 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) locating and reporting 10 people. - Notable requirements: Protect controlled unclassified information (CUI); meet CMMC Level 2 (Self-Assessment) and NIST SP 800-171 Revision 2 requirements. Participation is limited to U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents. - OEMs, vendors, products, and part numbers: None are named; the solicitation requests research and development services rather than specific commercial products.

Description

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is soliciting innovative proposals for Unison, a program to develop and evaluate collaborative-autonomy approaches that jointly adapt team decision-making and communications during mission execution. Unison will investigate approaches that enable autonomous teams to modify tactics, behaviors, coordination relationships, and information exchange as mission complexity and operational variability increase and communications become constrained and/or degraded (see Section 7, Glossary, for program-specific definitions of terms in italics).The core hypothesis of Unison is that a unified execution-time reasoning approach to action planning and communications planning can improve the effectiveness, scalability, and resilience of collaborative autonomy in dynamic, uncertain, and resource-constrained environments. Unison seeks to preserve mission performance while reducing communication dependence and bounding the reasoning burden imposed on individual agents.Unison frames collaborative autonomy as a multi-agent decision problem in which agents use local observations, mission context, relevance, and mission objectives to select a policy that jointly defines physical actions and communications actions. At each decision point, the team must determine what actions to take, which coordination relationships must be maintained, and what information must be exchanged to preserve the coordination required for mission success. Unison will investigate approaches across teams of tens to hundreds of agents operating in representative collaborative, multi-domain mission scenarios.

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