Autonomous Multi-Intelligence Acoustic Reasoning Agent for Anti-Submarine Warfare

The Department of the Navy (DON) seeks development of an autonomous decision-support and reasoning capability for ASW that can reduce dependence on continuous human interpretation of complex acoustic displays and enable future distributed unmanned ASW operations. Current ASW performance is heavily dependent on trained operators who interpret passive narrowband, passive broadband, Demodulation of Noise (DEMON), and other acoustic products while simultaneously incorporating situational knowledge such as geography, bathymetry, Conductivity Temperature and Depth (CTD) data for sound-speed structure, Global Positioning System (GPS), Automatic Identification System (AIS), organic/non-organic tracks, surface traffic, tactical geometry, and expected target behaviors. This human fusion process is effective but difficult to scale across persistent unmanned systems operating at range, under intermittent communications, and in acoustically cluttered environments. This SBIR topic requests development of an autonomous ASW agent that can ingest heterogeneous acoustic detections and associated confidence measures, correlate them with non-acoustic common operating picture data, reason over environmental acoustic propagation, and maintain multiple explainable track and classification hypotheses over time. The capability should explicitly account for confusers such as merchant shipping, fishing vessels, biologics, own-force and friendly surface ship contributions, reverberation/clutter, and geographically-dependent propagation effects. The resulting system should not be a single-sensor classifier only; it should demonstrate multi-source temporal reasoning that can explain why a contact is assessed as likely submarine, non-submarine, ambiguous, or requiring additional sensing. The approach should be modular and compatible with Navy acoustic processing and performance-prediction workflows, while allowing Navy-provided threat behavior models, environmental data, and acoustic feature streams to be incorporated without redesign. Submissions should include a description of prior sensor fusion development that will serve as a baseline for the proposed ASW fusion architecture. Work produced in Phase II may become classified. Note: The prospective contractor(s) must be U.S. owned and operated with no foreign influence as defined by 32 U.S.C. § 2004.20 et seq., National Industrial Security Program Executive Agent and Operating Manual, unless acceptable mitigating procedures can and have been implemented and approved by the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA) formerly Defense Security Service (DSS). The selected contractor and/or subcontractor must be able to acquire and maintain a secret level facility and Personnel Security Clearances. This will allow contractor personnel to perform on advanced phases of this project as set forth by DCSA and ONR in order to gain access to classified information pertaining to the national defense of the United States and its allies; this will be an inherent requirement. The selected company will be required to safeguard classified material during the advanced phases of this contract IAW the National Industrial Security Program Operating Manual (NISPOM), which can be found at Title 32, Part 2004.20 of the Code of Federal Regulations.