BAE Systems continues ACK work

2nd September 2021 - 12:15 GMT | by The Shephard News Team

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The DARPA vision for its Adapting Cross-Domain Kill-Webs programme. (Photo: DARPA)

DARPA awards Phase 2 contract for BAE to develop software under the Adapting Cross-Domain Kill-Webs programme.

DARPA has picked BAE Systems for further development of its Multi-domain Adaptive Request Service (MARS) software to ‘enable semi-autonomous, multi-domain mission planning’, the company announced on 31 August.

The $6.5 million Phase 2 contract, awarded under the Adapting Cross-Domain Kill-Webs (ACK) programme, follows a successful Phase 1 demonstration.

In Phase 1, the FAST Labs R&D division in BAE Systems worked with Carnegie Mellon University and Uncharted Software to create MARS. The Phase 1 demonstration highlighted how this software updates plans in real time during a live exercise, by ingesting information feeds to track the state of planned tasks and then generating options to adapt the plan to insert new tasks.

Under Phase 2, BAE Systems will scale up MARS capabilities designed to help operators make informed decisions by automatically identifying available assets across domains, and then rapidly assessing the costs and benefits of using those assets when adapting mission tasks.

ACK will culminate in a full-scale demonstration in an operationally realistic setting.