SBIR-STTR Award

A technical approach is needed that is capable of integrating Infrared (IR) target discrimination with Field of View (FOV) management to produce divert instructions to the missile platform over time. For Kinetic Weapons, Divert means called-for-lateral acceleration relative to interceptor center-line (up-down and right-left). A successful approach should concurrently optimize fuel reserve while positioning the seeker to maintain best fit of target cloud objects in its FOV. FORELL proposes to address this problem to develop and test an algorithm utilizing an agent based approach that will optimize kinetic kill vehicle's divert resources while enhancing discrimination and end game kill results. To optimize divert and field of view management perspective in order to discriminate the target cloud correctly, the IR missile seeker must be capable of initial discovery and keeping the "right objects" in its field of view as it approaches the target cloud. The problem domain includes time constrained optimization of intercept and field of view geometry, IR seeker object discrimination and divert fuel conservation. FORELL will develop and demonstrate an algorithm that shows such optimization capability. For commercialization, the AASFOVMM approach is extremely flexible and lends itself very well to the areas of Network Centric Warfare and Distributed Robotics.

For our National Defense, countermeasures remain one of the fundamental technical challenges facing ballistic missile defense programs. The NMD has achieved its initial discrimination successes against defined threats by allocating architectural, elemental and algorithmic requirements onto initial capability systems. NMD's initial success does not mean that the countermeasure problem is solved. Current discrimination techniques and capabilities of the initial deployment systems have not been evaluated against the breadth of countermeasures available to the offense. Discrimination algorithms have not been designed for all possible combinations of countermeasures. Sensor requirements for diverse threat and decoy populations have not been defined. Diversity of countermeasure approaches available to the offense is central to these problems. FORELL wishes to take up the diverse threat challenge. Phase I AASFOVM demonstrated an agent based capability to discriminate early in the seeker decision window with concurrent optimization of KV divert management. AASFOVM Phase II proposes to (1) extend the Phase I work to Enhance the fidelity of the demonstration/test environment and (2) apply the FORELL agent technology in a Sensor and KV Architecture Design Analysis Framework for next generation NMD missile designs that are robust to countermeasures.