Bid document

Notice of Intent to Review Marketplace Solutions

SHOPPING NOTICE: DARPA-SN-26-101

MARKETPLACE: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Expedited Research Innovation System (ERIS)
REQUIRING ACTIVITY: DARPA Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) NOTICE DATES: August 10, 2026 – July 31, 2027

TOPIC AREA: 2

1. PURPOSE

Between the notice dates listed above, DARPA IPTO will be actively “shopping” the ERIS Marketplace for innovative, post-competitive, awardable solutions that address modeling, simulation, and softwaredefined technical approaches to support decentralized, distributed, and horizontally integrated command and control for heterogeneous combat agents for sensing grids, unmanned aircraft systems, satellite constellations, collaborative aircraft, and ground or surface capabilities.

2. BACKGROUND & SCOPE

2.1 Background

Today’s paradigms for command and control often assume combat systems will maintain robust connectivity and centralized control with decentralized execution due to the proliferation of connectivity in the last 30 years. The reality of modern combat in the contested environment will test these assumptions; approaches that develop robust, resilient autonomy for decentralized and distributed integrated command and control for combat systems are paramount if these assumptions prove to be inaccurate.

2.2 Scope

DARPA IPTO is seeking proposals to advance the state of the art for closed-loop, open-loop, optimization-based, controls-based, systems-theoretic, information-theoretic, compressive, tokenization/encoding/quantization at the edge, and other technical approaches for autonomy frameworks to manage decentralized control at the edge. The scope of this shopping notice includes both short-term efforts as well as participation in ambitious technology development for a space autonomy program that seeks to deploy existing space-based hardware during its lifecycle. The focus of this autonomy program will include development of technologies to enable trustworthy agent-to-agent collaboration in a compute, bandwidth limited environment and for technologies that enable orchestration and autonomy at scale.

3. DESIRED CAPABILITIES AND EXPERTISE

While all submissions will be evaluated against the standard criteria published in the ERIS Master Program Solicitation (PS), IPTO will be specifically looking for solutions that demonstrate strength in the following areas. These are not new evaluation criteria but rather highlight the specific attributes of