DARPA OFFSET: Offensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics Program Follow-on

DARPA OFFSET: Offensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics Program Follow-on is sponsored by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Explores bio-inspired swarm designs and autonomy, applicable to biomimetic industrial systems for scalable manufacturing. This program should be reviewed carefully against your organization's mission, staffing capacity, timeline, and compliance readiness before you commit resources to a full application. Strong submissions usually translate sponsor priorities into concrete objectives, clear implementation milestones, and measurable public benefit.

For planning purposes, treat rolling deadlines or periodic funding windows as your working submission target unless the sponsor publishes an updated notice. A competitive project plan should include a documented need statement, implementation approach, evaluation framework, risk controls, and a realistic budget narrative. Even when a grant allows broad program design, reviewers still expect credible evidence that the proposed work can be executed within the grant period and with appropriate accountability.

Current published award information indicates $2,000,000 - $15,000,000 Organizations should verify the final funding range, matching requirements, and allowability rules directly in the official opportunity materials before preparing a budget. Finance and program teams should align early so direct costs, indirect costs, staffing assumptions, procurement timelines, and reporting obligations all remain consistent throughout drafting and post-award administration.

Eligibility guidance for this opportunity is: U.S. companies, academic institutions If your organization has partnerships, subrecipients, or collaborators, define responsibilities and compliance ownership before submission. Reviewers often look for implementation credibility, so letters of commitment, prior performance evidence, and a clear governance model can materially strengthen the application narrative and reduce concerns about delivery risk.

A practical approach is to begin with a focused readiness review, then build a workback schedule from the sponsor deadline. Confirm required attachments, registration dependencies, and internal approval checkpoints early. This reduces last-minute issues and improves submission quality. For the most accurate requirements, always rely on the official notice and primary source links associated with DARPA OFFSET: Offensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics Program Follow-on.

OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics An official website of the United States Government Official websites use . mil . mil website belongs to an official U.

S. Department of War organization. Secure .

mil websites use HTTPS ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the . mil website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

OFFSET: OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics OFFSET: OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics DARPA’s OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program envisions future small-unit infantry forces using swarms comprising upwards of 250 small unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) and/or small unmanned ground systems (UGSs) to accomplish diverse missions in complex urban environments.

By leveraging and combining emerging technologies in swarm autonomy and human-swarm teaming, the program seeks to enable rapid development and deployment of breakthrough capabilities. OFFSET aims to provide the tools to quickly generate swarm tactics, evaluate those swarm tactics for effectiveness, and integrate the best swarm tactics into field operations.

To accomplish these goals, OFFSET will develop an active swarm tactics development ecosystem and supporting open systems architecture, including: An advanced human-swarm interface to enable users to monitor and direct potentially hundreds of unmanned platforms simultaneously in real time. The program intends to leverage rapidly emerging immersive and intuitive interactive technologies (e. g.

, augmented and virtual reality, voice-, gesture-, and touch-based) to create a novel command interface with immersive situational awareness and decision presentation capabilities. The interface would also incorporate a swarm interaction grammar, enabling “freestyle” design of swarm tactics that allow dynamic action and reaction based on real-time conditions in the field.

A real-time, networked virtual environment that would support a physics-based, swarm tactics game. In the game, players would use the interface to rapidly explore, evolve, and evaluate swarm tactics to see which would potentially work best, whether using various unmanned systems in the real world or exploring innovative synthetic technologies in the virtual one.

Users could submit swarm tactics and track their performance from test rounds on a leaderboard, to encourage both competition and collaboration. A community-driven swarm tactics exchange. This curated, limited access program portal would house tools to help participants design swarm tactics by composing collective behaviors, swarm algorithms, and even other existing tactics.

It would provide these key ingredients to an extensible architecture for end-user-generated swarm tactics and help create a lasting community to innovate and cultivate the most effective tactics, with the potential to integrate third-party tactics and future users. OFFSET is structured to demonstrate its technologies through frequent live experiments with various unmanned air and ground platforms.

Roughly every six months, operational vignettes of progressively increasing complexity would challenge both the swarm architecture and the developed swarm tactics across numerous technological and operational test variables, such as swarm size, spatial scale of operations, and mission duration.

Users would employ the swarm interface to test the best of the virtual tactics in the real world, and interactively supply their unmanned platforms with near-real-time tactics updates using automated deployment technologies. This program is now complete This content is available for reference purposes. This page is no longer maintained.

Tactical Technology Office This program is now complete. This content is available for reference purposes. This page is no longer maintained.

Be part of a cutting-edge research and development agency that’s pushing the boundaries of what’s possible, in an energetic environment with excellent benefits. Find your future with DARPA Careers Our program managers are visionary leaders whose experience spans industry, government, and academia. They conceive, plan, and oversee the high-risk R&D efforts for which we are best known.

Research Opportunities View Programs DARPA has pushed, and will continue to push, the boundaries of technological possibility.

See the dreams we turned to reality Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency To create and prevent technological surprise for our national security Investors & Entrepreneurs Podcast (Voices from DARPA) Communications & Public Affairs Think beyond the impossible Accessibility/Section 508 Freedom of Information Act Privacy and Civil Liberties