DARPA pursuing technologies to help troops ID enemies.

• Author: Tadjdeh, Yasmin

As night falls, a small group of dismounted soldiers prowl a deserted city street. Small unmanned aerial vehicles buzz around them scanning for enemies. Robots follow them on the ground. Sensors attached to the troops' boots track their movements.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency hopes this scene comes to fruition some day.

In December, DARPA kicked off its Squad X Core Technologies program as a way to provide dismounted soldiers and Marines with better situational awareness in treacherous and degraded environments.

The agency wants to "extend" and "enhance" a rifle squad's field of view, said Maj. Christopher Orlowski, DARPA program manager for Squad X. That could include augmenting their physical senses through acoustic or visual sensors.

Another part of the concept is to provide small unit leaders with increased time and space to make decisions, which will in turn help them shape and dominate their battle space, he told National Defense.

DARPA awarded nine phase-one contracts to industry including: Helios Remote Sensing Systems, Kitware, Leidos, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Scientific Systems Company Inc., Six3 Systems Inc., SoarTech and SRI International.

The companies will work in one of four research areas: precision engagement, non-kinetic engagement, squad sensing and squad autonomy.

For precision engagement, "what we're looking for there is actually guided munitions capabilities that could be fired from current weapons platforms," Orlowski said.

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That includes the M2, M3 and M320 grenade launcher, he said. Companies may also propose a solution "where they would leverage the Picatinny rail systems that are on all M4s and Ml6s."

Under non-kinetic engagement the agency wants technology that can "disrupt enemy command and control, communications and use of unmanned assets at a squad-relevant operational pace," a DARPA press release said.

For squad sensing, the agency wants industry to produce systems that can detect potential threats out to 0.6 miles away.

"Squad sensing was focused on primarily detecting humans and unmanned systems within the environment and then determining whether or not those were threats," Orlowski said. Technology in this area could include multi-source data fusion.

For squad autonomy, the agency wants members to have "real-time knowledge of their own and teammates' locations to less than 20 feet (6 meters) in GPS-denied environments through collaboration with embedded unmanned...