The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will hold a proposers day on Oct. 28 to discuss with industry a new program that aims to develop advanced radar signal processing techniques.

The event will provide information on the Beyond Linear Processing program, which seeks to create non-linear and iterative signal processing techniques to improve the performance of smaller radar platforms, according to a notice posted Tuesday.

BLiP will develop, analyze and test the signal processing chains in a laboratory setting before conducting real-time implementation and field testing.

The proposers day will take place at Strategic Analysis Executive Conference Center and interested parties must register for the event on Oct. 21.

During the event, DARPA will answer industry questions and allow participants to present their capabilities for teaming agreements.

A multi-country survey conducted by Accenture indicated that public service customers want digitized processes to be simple, intuitive and secure to ensure privacy protection.

The company, which announced its findings on Wednesday, found that more than 40 percent of respondents still prefer telephone or in-person government transactions due to limited access to the Internet.

Accenture conducted the study among 5,500 consumers and 3,000 public service workers in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Germany, Japan, Australia, France, Italy, Singapore and Spain.

In the consumer survey, 39 percent of respondents answered that they wanted more digital government interaction. However, 53 percent of the respondents expressed frustration in online public services. They listed “ease of use” and “more confidence in data security and privacy” as top priorities in considering the use of digital government portals.

“The best step forward to improve customer experiences is to establish simple and secure processes so people can get what they need on the first try,” said Eyal Darmon, global public sector customer engagement lead at Accenture.

The report also showed that only one-third of government workers underwent cyber and data security training, even if 94 percent said they were confident in using new computerized tools.

“Continuous education and training on cyber-security could help increase government workers’ and customers’ confidence in digital government services,” Darmon added.

Mark Kitz, program executive officer for the U.S. Army’s intelligence, electronic warfare and sensors, said the service is soliciting industry insights to determine ways to field intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance payloads on high-altitude unmanned aircraft systems, Breaking Defense reported Wednesday.

The Army is focus on “programs at high altitude above 60,000 feet and how we can get after stratospheric sensing technologies, and then how we build sensor technologies that are resilient to this future environment,” Kitz said Monday at an annual conference.

He noted that the military branch is interested in assured positioning, navigation and timing, navigation warfare and “our ability to have trusted space and trusted sensors in our future.” 

Lt. Gen. Laura Potter, Army deputy chief of staff for intelligence (G2), said that high-altitude drones are part of the service’s “multi-layered sensing strategy.”

“Our strategy has three layers and a foundation: the space layer, optimizing what we can get from government or commercial things on orbit; an aerial layer that includes manned and unmanned platforms from the stratosphere to the mid- to high-altitude layer that is optimized with sensors for a high-end adversary to the ground layer; and the terrestrial layer where we need sensing at echelon,” she said.

The Defense Innovation Unit has selected Greensea Systems and Nauticus Robotics to build prototypes of unmanned amphibious systems for the U.S. Marine Corps to detect, identify and neutralize naval mines and other explosive hazards in surf and on beach landing zones.

DIU said Wednesday the Autonomous Amphibious Response Vehicle project intends to come up with prototypes of unmanned platforms that could interoperate with other underwater drones, underwater surface vehicles and explosive ordance disposal professionals as part of the Littoral Explosive Ordnance Neutralization program.

Greensea will partner with Bayonet Ocean Vehicles to work on the Bayonet-250 crawler prototype.

Nauticus Robotics will team up with VideoRay to develop a concept vehicle, called Terranaut, that would use thrusters to navigate through the seafloor.

USMC will conduct a user assessment of the submitted prototypes by the fall of 2023 and integrate the platforms with mission command systems. The service expects the prototypes to adopt open architecture standards to facilitate interoperability.

The Department of Defense’s innovation arm received 67 proposals for the A2RV program’s rapid prototyping phase.