HOLDING THE EDGE
Stryker crewmen with the 1st Squadron, 2nd Cavalry Regiment fire an M1128 Mobile Gun System during a joint live fire exer- cise in August at Bemowo Piskie Training Area, Poland. The Army RCO, in partnership with the Project Manager for Electronic Warfare and Cyber, opened a challenge to identify new approaches to signal detection to speed up the rate at which EWOs could elimi- nate the congestion that comes with signal detection. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. John Onuoha, 24th Press Camp Headquarters)
and completed in four months, it came with very little cost or burden placed on those participating.
“Te response was overwhelming,” Monto said. “We had more than 150 participants from across traditional and nontraditional industry partners, universities, labs and government. As an incen- tive, we offered $150,000 in prize money.”
RCO announced winners on Aug. 27. First place and $100,000 went to Team Platypus from Te Aerospace Corp., a national nonprofit corporation that operates a federally funded research and development center. Second place, with an award of $30,000, went to TeamAU, made up of a small team of independent Austra- lian data scientists. And third place, with a prize of $20,000, went to THUNDERINGPANDA of Motorola Solutions.
“Having a specific problem that can be worked on by indus- try, academia and private citizens is a great way to establish and build a community of innovators for this technology area,” said Dr. Andres Vila, an engineering specialist at Te Aero- space Corp. and a member of Team Platypus. “Tis challenge, which extended for approximately three months, was the right balance of having time to formulate a unique and robust solu- tion but also not so long that the team lost urgency to find that award-winning approach.”
Te challenge proved a better way to assess industry’s capabilities, instead of using a more traditional RFI and white paper approach, Vila said, calling it “spot on.”
“Te challenge arrived at a great time, as we were just kicking off this research and the Army had a well-formed problem set and, most importantly, data,” Vila said. “Tis competition gave us the chance to take our latest innovations and prototypes and
apply them to this new customer-curated, hard problem. Tese types of customer-sponsored competitions provide very focused challenges that give us the confidence that we are using the best technology available to meet their mission needs.”
THE PROBLEM SET Te idea for the challenge stemmed from RCO’s partnership with the Project Manager for Electronic Warfare and Cyber, within the Program Executive Office for Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors, which recently delivered new electronic warfare proto- type systems in response to an operational needs statement from U.S. Army Europe. Soldiers are using the equipment to imple- ment electronic protection for their own formations, to detect and understand enemy activity in the electromagnetic spectrum and to disrupt adversaries through electronic attack effects.
However, in enhancing the signal footprint for EWOs, the proto- type systems also brought more data to an already complex electromagnetic spectrum. Trough the challenge, RCO wanted to determine if artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ ML) could assist them in digesting that data and sorting through what is and isn’t important.
“We knew industry was already making leaps and bounds in applying AI/ML for image recognition and video recognition, but found that there was very little work being done in this specific area of signal detection,” Monto said. “What we discovered in a very short period of time is that AI/ML could in fact be applied to a data set that could translate to being integrated into an elec- tronic warfare system on the battlefield.”
Te idea is to create this application as a layering effect, whereby artificial intelligence and machine learning does one subset of signal classification for the EWOs, then layers other applications
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