Tactical Behaviors for Autonomous Maneuver

**UPDATE 5 APRIL 2024: The proposal submission date has been updated to 24 April 2024. The FOA has been amended to reflect this submission date and include a Question and Answer document based on questions received from interested applicants. Other than the updated proposal submission date in the FOA, the actual FOA Amendment has not been changed. However, the answers provided in the Q&A document are considered part of the FOA Amendment.**

**CYCLE 2 UPDATE 20 MARCH 2024 - THE OPPORTUNITY WEBINAR FOR CYCLE 2 WILL BE HELD ONLINE VIA MS TEAMS AT 1500 EDT ON 22 MARCH 2024 AT THE FOLLOWING LINK:

https://dod.teams.microsoft.us/l/meetup-join/19%3adod%3ameeting_5fa41fe6fa874484b473d8a6ba7921c6%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22fae6d70f-954b-4811-92b6-0530d6f84c43%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22e9f6fc39-8f22-44e5-8bd0-64f0cde32305%22%2c%22IsBroadcastMeeting%22%3atrue%7d

**UPDATE 14 MARCH 2024 - CYCLE 2 HAS BEEN POSTED TO THE ANNOUNCEMENT. PLEASE REVIEW THE UPDATED ANNOUNCEMENT IN FULL FOR SUBMISSION TIME, UPDATED TOPIC, AND FUNDING AMOUNT AND SCHEDULE CHANGES FROM CYCLE 1**

TACTICAL BEHAVIORS FOR AUTONOMOUS MANEUVER COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH PROGRAM (TBAM-CRP)

Future Army forces will be called upon to operate and maneuver in multi-domain

operations (MDO), against a modern and capable peer adversary. The battlefield of the future

may impose additional constraints on maneuver forces such as disruption in communication as

well as positioning services. To field a highly capable fighting force in this future battlefield,

novel tactics and doctrines leveraging nascent technologies in robotics and autonomous systems

(RAS) will need to be developed. Teams of RAS will serve an increasingly critical role in the

future force to deliver situational awareness, defend key locations or positions, or take point in

dynamic and hazardous situations. Resilience to disruptions, failures, or unexpected scenarios, is

a key quality for teams of RAS to operate alongside other future Army forces. The US Army

Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) Army Research Laboratory (ARL) is

focused on developing fundamental understanding and informing the art-of-the-possible for

warfighter concepts through research to greatly improve the scope of mission capabilities of

teams of RAS, develop robust and resilient approaches to plan under extreme conditions of

uncertainty, to learn coordinated strategies for groups of agents to achieve a common objective,

all within a complex maneuver environment including adversaries. The Tactical Behaviors for

Autonomous Maneuver Collaborative Research Program (TBAM-CRP) is focused on developing

and experimentally evaluating coordinated and individual behaviors for small groups of

autonomous agents to learn doctrinal as well as novel tactics for maneuvering in military relevant

environments. The TBAM-CRP will leverage developments in other internal and extramural

programs as well as identify new research directions to find novel solutions to these maneuver

problems in analogical simulations representing complex realistic terrain.

The Tactical Behaviors for Autonomous Maneuver Collaborative Research Program (TBAM-CRP) will

consist of a series of sprint efforts executed with annual program reviews. Each topic will be focused on

addressing a different set of scientific areas which will support the research aims of an associated ARL

researcher from a related internal essential research program (ERP) or mission-funded program.

The TBAM-CRP has been developed in coordination with other related ARL-funded collaborative efforts

(see descriptions of ARL collaborative alliances at https://www.arl.army.mil/business/collaborativealliances/)

and shares a common vision of highly collaborative academia-industry-government

partnerships; however, it will be executed with a program model adapted from the Scalable, Adaptive,

and Resilient Autonomy (SARA), which established a new paradigm for collaborative research. Some

key properties of this new approach are described below:

• TBAM-CRP sprint topics will be offered on a two-year cycle. Proposals will be solicited for a

possible two-year period structured as a first-year pilot followed by a second-year option where

the option may be awarded based upon progress assessed at an annual review. The FOA will be

amended annually to identify a specific problem statement and scope for that specific cycle. The

It is our goal for the program to include a diverse group of Applicants with varied long-term interests.Applicants may be institutions of higher education, for-profit, or non-profit organizations. FederallyFunded Research and Development Centers (FFRDC) may propose as well, with effort as allowed bytheir sponsoring agency and in accordance with their sponsoring agency policy. Proposals may consistof teams from any combination of organizations (e.g., prime and subawardees), but this is not arequirement for award and award will only be made to a single entity.