ATO Overview 1. Good Morning. Welcome to the Advanced Technology Office session. In the next 90 minutes you will see a brief overview of this new office as well as presentations on 4 specific programs by our Program Managers. We actively solicit your interest, support, and involvement in this new systems office. 2. As Dr. Fernandez has mentioned, in the recent reorganization of DARPA, the Advanced Technology Office (ATO) was created. ATO is a "systems" office whose focus is communications, maritime, and early entry and special operations. Existing DARPA programs within these areas have been moved to the new office. The purpose of the reorganization was to focus more clearly in these areas and to present a single office focal point to the outside in these areas. 3. These are the people who energize the new ATO office. Program Managers have come from essentially every other office in DARPA to stand up our new office. And we got some of the best! 4. The current communications programs in ATO run the gamut from improved devices (such as high temperature superconducting filters and low noise amplifiers) to large self- adapting wireless networks for secure connectivity as well as developing mobile network and communications nodes. A substantial effort in ATO is towards leveraging the capabilities of versatile software programmable radios. Today about 30% of a military radio is software and that amount is likely to increase within a few years to 80%. ATO is leading the field with advanced waveforms and new protocols to ensure that tomorrow's warfighter maintains the command and control necessary to prosecute the mission. One of the papers in this session, the Airborne Command Node (ACN), will showcase our research in communications. 5. There remain several significant challenges that still need to be addressed. Foremost among these is agile spectrum management. This is becoming a critical issue as the competing needs of commercial spectrum allocation and increasing sensor data rates are leaving the warfighter squeezed for spectrum. ATO is exploring how to optimize the spectrum allocation within theater, as well as, how squeeze the maximum data rate out of the bandwidth provided. In addition, ATO is examining the issue of assured access, especially in a potential hostile environment or one with significant multipath or fading due to buildings or terrain features. The system must have graceful degradation and must be multi-level secure. Another issue that will become increasingly important to the military is the development of high bandwidth, self-forming, autonomous nets for moving entities (vehicles and dismounted soldiers). ATO is currently working parts of these problems and will continue to push the state-of-the-art to develop the tools needed by the military. 6. ATO is committed to increasing the DARPA investment in the maritime arena. Currently we are developing an innovative program to fuse data from multiple sensors to acquire and target underwater vehicles in a highly cluttered environment. We are also completing work on disabling undersea mines and obstacles. A new effort, Submarine Payloads, that will be discussed in the briefings of this session, is exploring new roles and missions for submarines. This effort is looking at the submarine with a clean sheet of paper to develop the payloads, hull modifications, and conops to bring the submarines into the 21st century. Another challenge we are investigating is an overall systems study of minimizing the transit time from port to foxhole for troop or heavy cargo transport. One subset of this might be designs for very fast ships. Techniques for innovative hull designs as well as active drag reduction could be examined to push the envelope of operational capability. 7. Significant challenges exist for the maritime in the future. Foremost is the evolving roles and missions of the Navy and use of surface and subsurface vessels. ATO is committed to work closely with the Navy to explore new concepts and in enabling new capabilities through infusion of DARPA technology. One challenge, which I already mentioned, was the area of fast end-to-end transportation of heavy cargo. This may include the investigation of optimal platforms. Another potential area of interest is the development of highly efficient underwater power sources. The evolution of such a device, may open up the undersea world for increased military operations or commercialization. Finally, we are looking at the feasibility and utility of wide area subsurface mapping. In analogy to the land digital terrain elevation data "DTED", we are exploring the use and collection of subsurface "DTED". This is a significant collection challenge -- and little effort has been devoted to quantifying its military use. 8. A strong focus of ATO will be in developing technology and systems for early entry and special operations. Several programs are on-going in this area. The Alternatives to Land Mines, will be presented in this session. The ATO portfolio of efforts in this area include electronics, high rate of fire weapons (Metal Storm), robotics, unattended ground sensors, situational awareness visualization for the soldier, alternatives to antipersonnel landmines, as well as methods to find unexploded ordinances. 9. The most stressing future needs in early entry and special operations derive from the low intensity conflicts that may arise anywhere in the world and need to be resolved quickly. ATO is committed to develop technology and systems to enable our armed forces to rapidly deploy anywhere in the world while increasing lethality and survivability. To accomplish this mission will require new weapons and protection. It will also require situational awareness with low latency and high fidelity that gets the information (not just bits) to the right user -- in a way that is readily comprehensible. A cornerstone of this effort will be in the development of unmanned systems to not only remove the human from harm's way -- but to enable new capabilities and missions that are currently not achievable. We have clearly just scratched the surface with autonomous and teleoperated robotics and ATO is committed to continue pushing the frontier in this nascent field. 10. With the DARPA reorganization comes a new opportunity for future partnerships between the Advanced Technology Office, industry, and the services. With this new office, we have a new focus at DARPA -- Communications; Maritime; and Early Entry / Special Operations. We are actively soliciting new ideas that can enhance the U.S. military's effectiveness. If you have some great ideas -- please contact us. We will be around during DARPATech and we can also be reached at DARPA. In addition -- we are looking for great people to join ATO. Whether from academia, military, or industry -- there are opportunities to join DARPA for a few years and help personally make a difference. We will also be developing several BAAs over the next few months covering new research topics. Please look to the DARPA web page for details. Thanks for your interest.