Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA) competition: Advanced Radio Frequency Sensing, Integrated Effects and PNT

This Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA) competition is funded by the Bright Corvus Project, under MOD’s Future Sensing and Situational Awareness (FSSA) Science & Technology (S&T) Programme.

This DASA competition will prioritise proposals focussed on raising the Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs) of a concept, ahead of proposals looking to develop existing innovation at a high TRL. The competition would welcome proposals from as low as fundamental technical principles and concepts (TRL 1 or 2), and at the end of the project, outputs should be at TRL3 to 6. Proposals must offer a view on exploitation beyond DASA project completion. Where feasible, at the end of projects, outputs should be suitable for consideration for exploitation via Bright Corvus experimentation activities.

The Bright Corvus Project aims to develop and demonstrate novel S&T in distributed Radio Frequency (RF) sensing; integrated RF effects; and provision of Position, Navigation and Timing (PNT) as a Service (PNTaaS) that all contribute to delivering disruptive change compared to current Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities.

Resilience, agility, performance advantage, cost reduction and delivery of focused effects are key factors to support a move away from large monolithic sensors, towards spatially distributed, pervasive, sensor systems that exploit autonomy to enable rapid system self-configuration for mission agility and response to emerging threats. Integrating ISR systems with effectors capable of delivering RF effects will result in cognitive sensing, Electronic Warfare (EW) and datalinks from single payloads. This will be supported by absolute or relative PNT in a service-based architecture.

Briefings & Dial-in sessions for Competition Launch

Thursday 3 March 2022 – A dial-in/online session providing further detail on the problem space and a chance to ask questions in an open forum is planned as part of Competition Launch activities. If you would like to participate, please register on the Eventbrite page.

Tuesday 8 and Thursday 10 March 2022 – A series of 15 minute one-to-one teleconference sessions, giving you the opportunity to ask specific questions. If you would like to participate, please register on the relevant Eventbrite page: Tuesday 8 March and Thursday 10 March. Booking is on a first come first served basis.

We encourage collaboration between organisations for this competition. To support this we have a short survey to collect details of those who wish to explore collaboration possibilities. If you are interested in a collaboration, please complete the survey and your details will be circulated among other potential suppliers who have completed the survey and are interested in collaborating.

If you choose to complete the supplier collaboration survey, please be aware all of the information you submit in the survey will be provided to other suppliers who also complete the survey. All industry collaboration for proposal submissions is on an industry-industry basis. Inclusion or absence of any individual supplier organisation will not affect assessment, which will be solely on technical evidence in the proposal.

Competition focus is multi-function, distributed RF Sensing (including RADAR and Electronic Surveillance (ES) of both communications and radar bands) in support of effects-based activities including ISR, situational awareness, targeting and post-action assessment. Multi-modal aspects are welcomed on platforms and between platforms. These can include cross-cueing of non-RF modalities (but NOT development of non-RF modalities).

Innovations supporting the targeting, delivery and post-action assessment of active RF effects (including Electronic Attack (EA), Electronic Countermeasures) are welcomed. Proposals in this area will need to comply with regulatory obligations relevant to their technology and its demonstration / testing.

Successful proposals will;

• describe how they will demonstrate benefits of their innovation against indicative scenarios or comparative technologies using lab or field demonstrations, modelling and analysis.
• show evidence of the innovation being enabled by self-configuring and adaptable architectures, which move away from ‘manual’ cooperative/coordinated approaches towards coherent sensing with autonomous sensor management and tasking.
• show evidence of how they support the identified broader Bright Corvus Project aims.