Unison

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is soliciting innovative proposals for Unison, a program to develop and evaluate collaborative-autonomy approaches that jointly adapt team decision-making and communications during mission execution. Unison will investigate approaches that enable autonomous teams to modify tactics, behaviors, coordination relationships, and information exchange as mission complexity and operational variability increase and communications become constrained and/or degraded (see Section 7, Glossary, for program-specific definitions of terms in italics).

The core hypothesis of Unison is that a unified execution-time reasoning approach to action planning and communications planning can improve the effectiveness, scalability, and resilience of collaborative autonomy in dynamic, uncertain, and resource-constrained environments. Unison seeks to preserve mission performance while reducing communication dependence and bounding the reasoning burden imposed on individual agents.

Unison frames collaborative autonomy as a multi-agent decision problem in which agents use local observations, mission context, relevance, and mission objectives to select a policy that jointly defines physical actions and communications actions. At each decision point, the team must determine what actions to take, which coordination relationships must be maintained, and what information must be exchanged to preserve the coordination required for mission success. Unison will investigate approaches across teams of tens to hundreds of agents operating in representative collaborative, multi-domain mission scenarios.