The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched a three-year contest to develop wireless radios with Artificial Intelligence (AI) that can determine the most effective and efficient way to use the radio frequency spectrum. First prize is $2 million.

Teams that join this DARPA program, the "Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2)," will have to demonstrate new technologies that represent a "paradigm shift" with both military and commercial applications.

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"The real crux of the problem is -- when you look at users of the spectrum, whether they are commercial users of the spectrum, whether they're consumers or they're the military -- the thing that is ubiquitously true is we all are placing more and more and more demand on the spectrum. And all of that demand is really adding up and going to stress the way that we actually manage the spectrum," said Paul Tilghman, program manager.

"Where do we put our communications systems? Where do we put our radars? Where do we put our (electronic warfare) systems?"

Today's problem with the radio frequency spectrum is the government has managed the much the same way since the invention of the radio in the early 1900s.

The government divided the spectrum into bits and assigned these bits to government and commercial entities. Tilghman said this lack of agility results in a lack of efficiency since portions of the spectrum can be overtaxed while others are not in use.

DARPA wants participants to figure-out how to make radios adapt to the current spectrum environment and keep pace with any real-time changes.

"The goal of the Spectrum Collaboration Challenge is to take a bunch of radio systems that have no prior knowledge of each other and say: 'Your goal is to get the best, most optimal use of the spectrum you can possibly can.' We're going to do this in a large, open tournament where multiple teams come in and compete to bring their best designs forward," he said.

What sets the Spectrum Collaboration Challenge apart from other adaptive radio efforts is the focus on AI as a key enabler.

"This idea of AI systems that can learn to collaborate with each other is really sort of a fundamentally untapped area," he said. "And very specifically, we want to know if AI can tackle this problem."

While the Sept. 2 deadline to submit a proposal to DARPA has passed, teams can still vie for a chance to participate in the challenge through the "open track" meant to engage nontraditional participants without experience in bidding for government contracts.

The agency will award a contract to the vendors who put forward the best proposal, but participants in the open track stand to win prize money of equivalent value if they can make it through several "hurdles" meant to weed out technologies that need more work. 

TagsDefense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, Artificial Intelligence, AI, Spectrum Collaboration Challenge, SC2, radio frequency spectrum