The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Special Projects Office (SPO) released Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) 06-04 on 25 October 2005 for the VisiBuilding Program. DARPA will hold a Proposers Day Briefing for the VisiBuilding BAA 06-04 on 14 November 2005 at the Booz Allen Hamilton – Newman Auditorium 8283 Greensboro Drive, McLean, VA 22102. Doors will open at 0800, and presentations will begin at 0845. Potential proposers should visit the VisiBuilding Industry Day website https://www.schafertmd.com/VisibuildingIndustryDay/index.html for more information and to receive further instructions for attending. The conference schedule will be sent with confirmation emails. The meeting will be Unclassified. All attendees at the Proposers Day Briefing must be pre-approved and pre-registered before the meeting starts. The number of attendees per organization may be limited due to space considerations. The deadline for registration is November 10, 2005. All questions regarding attendance should be emailed to
[email protected]. The goal of the VisiBuilding program is to develop knowledge-deriving architectures for sensing people and objects in buildings. The program will address propagation and backscatter off urban structures, develop operational concepts for sensor position and utilization, and derive model-driven algorithms that best match hypothesized structural models with the actual sensed data. A key component of VisiBuilding will be how to make the technology operationally useful to support all stand-off sense-through-buildings concepts of operations (CONOPS), ranging from pre-mission planning to find which buildings should be searched, through detailed assessment of targeted structures for building layouts and behavioral analysis, live updates of building occupancy to support building raids, and finally post-mission analysis to find hidden objects or people. Sensor and exploitation architectures must provide: 1) a detailed understanding of the building structure to provide actionable information on building layouts, and provide reasonable floor plans of the structure, 2) detection and localization of anomalous quantities of materials within the building structure, and 3) detection and localization of people within a building. In order to be effective, VisiBuilding must demonstrate penetration and interpretation through at least two exterior-grade walls using standard building construction materials such as reinforced concrete, concrete block, brick, adobe, etc. Concrete and concrete block should be at least eight inches (20 cm) in thickness. Sensor architectures must be able to resolve wall positions to within 0.5 meters laterally and ceiling and floor locations within 0.5 meters vertically, with a 95 percent probability of correct localization. Similarly, they must be able to detect and localize non-structure related materials larger than 3 square meters in size beyond two walls. They must also be able to detect, resolve, and locate moving personnel within 0.5 meters with a 99 percent probability of detection and 1 percent false alarm rate with a minimum detectable velocity of 0.5 meters/second. Sensor architectures should permit close-range stand-off from the building to be examined. Stand-off distances should at least be 10 meters, or on the order of street-level access or from neighboring structures. Ideally, sensor configurations should allow for discrete (perhaps covert) examination of the building structure through some combination of any or all of the following: small distributed hand-held or emplaced sensors, vehicle-borne sensors, and/or airborne or perching sensors. Sensor architectures will be an important facet of this development, but the key technology advances are expected in the areas of phenomenology, sensor architectures, and exploitation and model-based reconstruction algorithms. These three areas are tightly coupled, and the interdependencies between them should be represented in the proposals program and management plan. The program will be a multi-phase effort, with each phase constructed to advance the technology towards a full demonstration of capability. Phase I will be a twelve-month Concept Development and Evaluation effort to develop conceptual ideas in one or more sensor modes and configurations. The proposed architecture will be simulated and analyzed to show concept realism for penetrating deep within standard buildings. This will lead into a concept design review. The result of this phase will be concept design(s) and the estimated performance for the Phase II Sensor Demonstration System(s), and an updated execution plan and cost for the Phase II prototype design, development, and demonstration effort. The following descriptions of Phase II and III activities are notional. Any and all aspects of these phases are subject to change pending the outcome of Phase I (and Phase II results for Phase III). Selected performers may continue with Phase II, an eighteen month Sensor Demonstration System phase to develop the sensor and exploitation architecture and demonstrate its capability on two-story structures. This phase will require developing a full sensor system and exploitation architecture meeting design objectives on selected building structures. Based upon the Phase II demonstration results and an updated form-fit prototype description, selected performers may continue Phase III for a fifteen month Advanced Prototype Development effort to develop a full prototype system that can sense and accurately model multi-story structures, including all necessary sensor communication and on-line processing. Work under the VisiBuilding Program will be unclassified.