A -- HETEROGENEOUS URBAN RSTA (RECONNAISSANCE SURVEILLANCE AND TARGET ACQUISITION) TEAM

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Exploitation Office (IXO) intends to publish a Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) on or before December 12, 2003 on the HURT program. A Briefing to Industry (BTI) is scheduled for November 20, 2003 to be held in Arlington, VA. Advanced registration for the BTI is required. No walk-ins will be registered at time of the BTI. Persons not registered at time of BTI will not be admitted into the meeting. At meeting check-in, registered participants will be required to show a government issued picture identification and pay a per person fee of $40. Persons interested in attending the BTI are required to register by November 14, 2003. For further information on location and on-line registration, reference URL: http://www.tfims.darpa.mil/BTI. The purpose of the HURT BTI is to broadly articulate the vision, goals, technology organization and programmatic structure of the HURT program. The BTI also provides an opportunity for interested persons to meet and begin to assess possibilities for collaboration. HURT BTI briefing material and a FAQ will be posted at http://www.darpa.mil/ixo/solicitations/HURT/index.htm within 5 days following the BTI. No handouts will be provided at the meeting. The HURT program will develop technologies enabling mission-driven command and control of a heterogeneous team of uninhabited platforms for the conduct of coordinated urban operations. The class of uninhabited platforms of particular interest in the HURT program is aerial vehicles. The roboticized Reconnaissance Surveillance and Target Acquisition (RSTA) team, under HURT control, will provide services to warfighters according to user demand as modulated by mission priority subject to resource availability. HURT technology will be used to decouple users from direct platform control and tasking. HURT Platform Management technologies will provide symbolic representations of platform, payload and algorithm capabilities that allow mission-level planning and tasking. HURT User Management technologies will permit multiple, dispersed users to formulate and register mission-centric service requests and will provide context-dependent service arbitration mechanisms. HURT Planning/Control Technologies will permit tasking/retasking of RSTA team resources based on symbolic representations of available capabilities, mission-level service requests, arbitration policies, and subject to operational constraints. Importantly, technologies developed in HURT will permit rapid integration (disintegration) of platforms into (out of) the team. HURT will not be pursuing any platform-based autonomy, control, or sensing technologies; only collectively managing and controlling arbitrarily-teamed components. The Government will not reimburse attendees for any costs associated with the BTI discussed in this announcement. All questions regarding this announcement and/or the HURT program, in general, are to be sent to [email protected]. The Point of Contact for this announcement is Michael D. Blackstone, Contracting Officer, DARPA/CMO, email: [email protected]. This announcement does not impose any obligation on the Government or signify a firm intention to enter into a contract.