Air Force seeks scientists to help unmanned aircraft collaboratively track targets

The Air Force is looking for engineers who can develop technology to help different unmanned aircraft collaboratively track targets, according to an announcement on grants.gov.

The goal of the United States Air Force Academy research program, called Cooperative Technologies for Unmanned Systems, is to explore the potential for combining data from various sensors on unmanned aircraft to improve the accuracy of geo-locating moving targets. Air Force-funded scientists will be expected to build tools that fuse information gleaned from various sensors and account for any time delay in data transmission.

The technology developed will help the service stitch together the strengths of various surveillance planes and unmanned systems. “The cooperative sensing, control, and communication technologies must be integrated in an overall architecture and must also be modular to accommodate future technology integration,” states the solicitation.

White papers are due by July 1. One award for $460,000 to $550,000 is anticipated in August, according to the database.