Open Architecture Platform for Underwater Vehicles for Rapid Adaptation, Collaborative Sensing, Navigation, and Autonomy

The contract seeks the development of an open architecture platform for autonomous underwater vehicles designed to overcome the limitations of current proprietary systems by enabling rapid adaptation, collaborative sensing, navigation, and autonomy across defense, commercial, and scientific missions. The platform must reduce mechanical complexity while maintaining precise control throughout the water column, including stable fixed-depth stationkeeping, to ensure reliable data collection. It must support an end-to-end mission lifecycle powered by AI-driven mission optimization that dynamically configures vehicle hardware and software configurations, physics-based simulations to preempt operational risks before deployment, and automated data offloading to facilitate continuous learning across a fleet of vehicles. Vehicle stability, predictable performance, and payload flexibility are critical to mission success and operational scalability. The architecture must be built around an open, modular framework that promotes multi-platform collaboration and minimizes downtime for maintenance or reconfiguration. The solicitation is a total small business set-aside under the SBIR/STTR mandate, limiting eligibility to organizations with fewer than 500 employees, and is being managed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under the Department of Defense. Proposals are due by August 26, 2026, with the opportunity posted on August 5, 2026. The platform is expected to enable mission agility at scale, support real-time adaptation to dynamic underwater environments, and deliver operational resilience through standardized interfaces, autonomous decision-making, and seamless data integration across distributed underwater systems.