Developing Open Communication Standards for Autonomous Weapon Collaboration

Autonomous collaboration is clearly a game-changer for the United States Air Force. However, the current wireless communication and modular interface standards designed to support autonomous collaboration are suboptimal and lack specific tailoring for small, weapon form-factor sizes. To address this shortfall, this SBIR Phase I proposal focuses on expanding the current open communication subsystem (OCS) standard, to include profiles tailored for weapons, and utilizing a modular open systems approach (MOSA) built within the Weapons Open System Architecture (WOSA) to enable robust collaboration of airborne weapons. In addition, this effort will also allow the Air Force and its industry partners the ability to quickly integrate their technologies in a modular, “plugfest” where the Air Force and its partners can compete their technologies against one another in a “Coliseum-like” environment. Ultimately, this would allow the Air Force to rapidly identify the best technologies to field while ensuring these technologies have sustainable open, modular architectures.