The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is looking for ideas from industry for a new concept that would allow remotely piloted vehicles to be placed in pressure-proof containers at the bottom of the sea near potential future flashpoints. Those vehicles -- with their intelligence-gathering payloads -- would then be deployed if a crisis took place in a particular region where regular assets would take longer to arrive on station, according to the Jan. 11 Federal Business Opportunities notice.
To that end, DARPA plans to host a "Proposers' Day Conference" for what the agency has labeled the "Upward Falling Payload" program on Friday, Jan. 25. The event will take place at DARPA's conference center in Arlington, VA, the notice states, adding: "The purpose of this conference is to provide information on the UFP program; promote additional discussion on this topic; and to address questions from potential proposers."
The notice further states:
Cost and complexity limit the number of ships and weapon systems the Navy can support in forward operating areas. This concentration of force structure is magnified as areas of contested environments grow. A natural response is to develop lower-cost unmanned and distributed systems that can deliver effects and situation awareness at a distance. However, power and logistics to deliver these systems over vast ocean areas limit their utility. The Upward Falling Payload (UFP) program intends to overcome these barriers. The objective of the UFP program is to realize a new approach for enabling forward deployed unmanned distributed systems that can provide non-lethal effects or situation awareness over large maritime areas. The approach centers on pre-deploying deep-ocean nodes years in advance in forward areas which can be commanded from standoff to launch to the surface. The UFP system is envisioned to consist of three key subsystems: (1) The ‘payload' which executes waterborne or airborne applications after being deployed to the surface, (2) The UFP ‘riser' which provides pressure tolerant encapsulation and launch (ascent) of the payload, and (3) The UFP communications which triggers the UFP riser to launch. A multi-phase effort is envisioned to design, develop, and demonstrate UFP systems.