Undersea Technologies for Autonomous Detection and Communications

The Office of Naval Research (ONR) is soliciting white papers and full proposals for technologies to enable advanced maritime surveillance and response capabilities. Work under this BAA will consist of applied research and advanced technology development, and it will be funded under Budget Activity 2 and 3 respectively (as defined in DoD Financial Management Regulation Vol. 2B, Ch. 5). The overall S&T effort is envisioned to be conducted at the TRL 2-6 stage. Background and Objectives The overall objective of this program is to conduct applied research and advanced technology development for an undersea system to autonomously detect targets and to communicate through both seawater and the air-sea interface. Its foci are 1) detection and classification of objects of interest with high confidence, and 2) transmission of these objects of interest in areas with tactical constraint. 1) Autonomous Detection, Tracking, Localization, and Identification. Under this thrust, both hardware and software products to detect, discriminate, and classify sources of interest will be investigated to optimize quality, speed of production, and level of production in autonomous employment. 2) Command, Control, and Communications (C3). This thrust will provide undersea data collection, storage, intra-nodal transfer, and/or exfiltration in real-time or in a "store-and-forward" capacity to remote sites. The following subsections describe the technology thrusts in more detail. Some specific topics of interest are given below, but submissions within the general interest area are encouraged and will be considered. The expected deliverables include hardware, firmware as needed to support hardware, software prototypes, algorithmic descriptions, and study findings as appropriate. Data rights for technologies developed or leveraged for this effort should be clearly stated in the White Paper and proposal; however, proposals should assume either government purpose rights (GPR) or unlimited rights. Justification provided for data rights more restrictive than GPR will be considered on a case-by-case basis.