Intelligent Threat Aware Autonomy - SBIR Topic DAF26BZ01-NV006

Disclaimer:
This topic was temporarily posted by the Department of War SBIR Program on March 2nd 2026 and removed the following day.
We believe this topic is planned to be released once the SBIR program is reauthorized; however, this topic may ultimately be modified or withdrawn.

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Funding Amount:

Est. $140,000

Deadline to Apply:

Est. April 29th, 2026.

Objective:

The objectives are to do: 1. Weapon Engagement Zone (WEZ) Modeling: Develop models to represent the area where a weapon can effectively engage targets. This involves considering factors like weapon range, vehicle movement, and threat trajectories, to provide risk measures for path planning and weapons employment.2. WEZ Avoidance: Develop path planning algorithms for ACPs to navigate safely through dynamic WEZs, minimizing risk while reaching objectives efficiently. This requires real-time solutions that can handle multiple static and moving threats.3. Advanced Weaponeering: Optimize weapon usage for ACPs to maximize target capture and neutralization. This includes assigning appropriate weapons to targets, considering target movement and the overall mission context.4. Mutual Support: Investigate how multiple ACPs can cooperate effectively in adversarial situations. This includes coordinated movement to avoid threats and collaborative weapon engagement for increased effectiveness.

Description:

To address future Air Force strategic needs, an increasing number of advanced systems with intelligent autonomy are being envisioned. Intelligent autonomy is central to systems involving advanced automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, adaptive control architectures, and heightened performance compared to the state of the art. A critical need for enabling these future autonomous systems are behaviors that can be leveraged by higher level cognition or mission managers to achieve collaborative mission execution for ACPs. The question that needs to be asked is, “Provided that systems have all the data available to them from sensors and mission objectives, what is it that the systems actually have to do to be successful in their mission?” It is clear that the sensing and available of data is a critical requirement for making informed decisions, this may entail a deep investigation on coupling behaviors with sensing capability; but, the focus of this effort is more toward the thinking and action than the sensing of the sense-think-act process flow. Near term objectives of this work are to invest in basic and applied research to building on the accomplished R&D, address specific identified technical challenges and tools for solving Intelligent Threat Aware Autonomy (ITA2) objectives. Far term objectives involve advanced technology development to constrict ITA2 avionics packages, perform real-time hardware and flight testing of ITA2 products, manufacture vehicles capable of performing ITA2 or hardware that interfaces with current ACPs, and flight test on Air Force / DoD commercial platforms.

Intelligent Threat Aware Autonomy (ITA2) is aimed at finding ways to take measured risks and enable autonomous systems to achieve air superiority in threat laden environments. Multiple facets of this project are to be investigated including: ways of measuring risk from ensuing threats, leveraging own-ship weapon models for capturing targets of interest, avoiding adversarial threats, addressing limited communication range and navigational error, quantifying mutual support and types of mutual support, and measures of force through collaboration and teaming. Lastly, the addressing of uncertainty of own-ship(s) states, target vehicle(s) states, operations boundaries, target vehicle capability, and other forms of uncertainties such as communication delay and environmental disturbances (wind) are important for obtaining reliable and robust behaviors.

Vehicle control is performed by providing the vehicles desired aim-points or waypoint plans in three-dimensional space. The inner loop control systems of aircraft is out of scope of this work; rather, interfacing with current / existing vehicle control technologies is expected though the use of aim-points. This reduces the burden of developing the necessary vehicle control commands such as normal acceleration, roll-rate, and throttle. Furthermore, it leverages the most state of the art methods for performing vehicle control and AI enabling technologies.

The technology within this topic is restricted under the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR), 22 CFR Parts 120-130, which controls the export and import of defense-related material and services, including export of sensitive technical data, or the Export Administration Regulation (EAR), 15 CFR Parts 730-774, which controls dual use items. Offerors must disclose any proposed use of foreign nationals (FNs), their country(ies) of origin, the type of visa or work permit possessed, and the statement of work (SOW) tasks intended for accomplishment by the FN(s) in accordance with section 3.5 of the Announcement. Offerors are advised foreign nationals proposed to perform on this topic may be restricted due to the technical data under US Export Control Laws.

Who will win?

If you can achieve the objective above better than any other company on the market, you have a very high-likelihood of success and should apply.

Who is eligible to apply?

Any company that meets the following criteria:

• For-profit company

• U.S.-owned and controlled.

• 500 or fewer employees (including affiliates)

How Can BW&CO Help?

1) End-to-end support including, strategy, writing of the full proposal, and administrative & compliance support.

2) Proposal strategy and review.

3) Administrative & compliance support.

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