The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has selected the research teams to work on a program aimed at developing safe military obscurants that will suppress adversary forces’ vision and detection systems to provide U.S. warfighters with an asymmetric advantage on the battlefield.
A team led by Raytheon Technologies Research Center will work on the passive asymmetry technical area of the Coded Visibility program, which involves the development of new obscurants composed of multiple particulates and demonstration of asymmetric vision capabilities in laboratory, pilot and field tests, DARPA said Tuesday.
Northeastern University, Signature Research and Georgia Tech Research Institute were selected to participate in the program’s active symmetry technical area to assess new tunable particulates and associated active modulation mechanisms.
The selected teams in both technical areas will also model and simulate the obscurants to assess performance against sensors.
“The teams we selected aim to develop new types of non-hazardous obscurant particulates that can be tailored to provide asymmetry – that is to allow U.S. and allied forces to see the enemy through the plume in one direction, while the adversary is unable to see through the plume in the opposite direction,” said Rohith Chandrasekar, CV program manager in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office.
