KNOWMADICS, INC. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase II: AF221-DCSO1

Description

The benefits that small unmanned systems (UMS) afford are increasingly salient to dismounted Operators. UMS can be employed to provide a truly flexible range of benefits that serve to enhance situational awareness, preserve survivability, and/or increase lethality. Despite these potential benefits, there are still no proven commercial UMS platforms that have become the trusted standard for squad-level operations, largely due to: (1) the fractured market of commercial UMS OEMs; (2) a lack of objective and quantified data comparing UMS performance under military contexts; (3) a lack of proven UMS TTPs for achieving different classes of mission objectives; and (4) an evolving understanding of how advancing UMS technology can be applied to impact mission outcomes. To address these gaps, Knowmadics' proposed Phase II effort will focus on design, prototyping, T&E, and application of the DEVILS RANGE (Demonstration, Evaluation, and Validation via an Instrumented Live Unmanned Systems Range). The DEVILS RANGE will address the challenges of trusting and relying on commercial UMS technologies by providing a contextualized demonstration, testing, vulnerability assessment, and evaluation range that will enable objective assessment and characterization of the most performant UMS platforms and payloads available to support US Forces mission requirements.