University and Industry Research Centers

The Army Advanced Energetics Center will develop a fundamental knowledge base for greater than 5x lethality and range of guns and projectiles through the discovery of disruptive energetic materials and exceeding the strategic objectives of current programs. This research focuses on high through-put synthesis and rapid characterization to accelerate discovery of next generation materials to enable Army domination of the future battlefield.

This effort focuses on development of the algorithmic underpinnings of adaptive, resilient, and tactically relevant behaviors for teams of autonomous ground and aerial vehicles, which will enable multi-domain autonomous maneuver.

The Army Advanced Biological Control Center will develop a fundamental knowledge base for precise, reliable control of engineered biological systems for functional effect during military operations. By exploiting fundamental relationships governing the functions and properties of biological systems, the center will develop advanced control schemes using synthetic biology targeting two key areas: 1) Genetic Control of Material Properties and 2) Biological Control in Competitive Environments.

This effort coordinates, conducts, and accelerates basic research to address Army-specific challenges, with a focus on advancing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities for autonomous maneuver in multi-domain operations (MDO). A broad-spectrum of AI capabilities are critical to the integration of operations in the contested environment including human-agent teaming for faster and more informed decisions, multi-domain Command, Control, Communications, and Computers (C4) that is resilient to Cyber Electromagnetic Activities (CEMA), and AI enabled cyber security that is robust to enemy deception. The Army will leverage existing High Performance Computing (HPC) and network infrastructure, along with regional laboratory extensions to enable basic research on AI that is open, with top-tier universities, commercial businesses, and established Department of Defense industrial partners. The A2I2 creates an accessible database of heterogeneous data, a repository of AI and ML algorithms and software tools, and military-relevant challenge problems.

By developing and validating theoretical principles of human-agent team states and processes, this effort defines methods for exploiting individual dynamics and variability to improve team-level properties and performance.

This effort performs multidisciplinary basic research in the area of neuroscience through collaboration with the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Establish the underpinning science to extend the reach, situational awareness, and operational effectiveness of intelligent system and soldier teams against dynamic threats in complex and contested environments and provide technical and operational superiority through fast, intelligent, resilient, and collaborative behaviors. Research efforts will enable distributed systems to engage in complex, time-varying, and contested environments to accomplish Army missions by leveraging a mix of online adaptation and system-wide resilience.

This research will address the fundamental science underpinning the complex information network issues that are vital to future United States (US) / United Kingdom (UK) coalition military operations and to fully exploit the joint development of emerging technologies necessary to enable coalition operations. These efforts provide enhanced ability to perform adaptive, goal- driven, semantically-aware, distributed analytics for situational understanding in coalition operations.

The IoBT CTA seeks to gain fundamental understanding of Internet of Things (IoT) phenomena and its performance in tactical environments, ranging from sparse, remote settings to complex, dense urban environments. Research will address intelligent resourcing and influence in complex, constrained, and uncertain networks (demand from massive numbers of dynamically connected devices, limited and unpredictable connectivity, shared civilian networks, computation at or near the device), heterogeneous sensing and actuation devices (efficient, smart devices with self-organizing/preservation/directing capabilities), and variable and unreliable provenance and dynamisms of information and device signals.

This work supports quantum information science basic research for next generation capabilities in entanglement-enhanced novel sensors and communications for Army dominance on the future battlefield.

The focus of the HBCU/MI RCE Program is to enhance Army-relevant research infrastructure, talent, and ecosystems at institutions that have been underrepresented in the Army research enterprise. The program invests in innovative basic research in areas of strategic importance to the Army identified through the competitive selection of HBCU and MI research teams for grants or cooperative agreements.

The ARC is an United States Army Center of Excellence for Modeling and Simulation of ground vehicles. The center relies on the collaboration of researchers from multiple universities and disciplines to bridge fundamental technology gaps in five research thrust areas of strategic importance to the Army: mobility, human factors and man-machine integration, lightweight structure and materials, power and energy, and design integration. A major integrative focus of these five areas is autonomy and manned-unmanned teaming.

VLRCOE agreements with Pennsylvania State University, the University of Maryland, and the Georgia Institute of Technology to supplement a robust experimental and analytic basic research program in rotorcraft technologies including: Aeromechanics, Structures, Flight Dynamics and Control, Rotorcraft Design and Concepts, Vibration and Noise Control, Propulsion, Affordability, Safety and Survivability, and Naval Operations.

This effort investigates Nanomaterials and Nanotechnologies for Soldier applications focused on light-weight, multifunctional nanostructured fibers and materials.

This effort focuses on basic research of Immersive Environments and spans a number of key areas to include virtual humans, three-dimensional (3D) sound and visual media to achieve more efficient and affordable training, modeling, simulation, and application solutions and tools. Research includes: investigation of techniques and methods to address the rapid development of synthetic environments and the study of perception and cognition to help direct the development of new technologies and techniques that evoke more realistic responses from users; auditory aspects of immersion to provide the sound stimulus for increasing the realism for military training and simulation devices; new computational techniques in graphics for achieving real-time photo-realistic rendering of physical and synthetic environments for training and simulations; innovative methods for automatically generating animations and gestures for virtual humans based on what is being communicated; new technologies for scanning real people and rapidly generating virtual humans which look like these people significantly reducing the time, expense, and effort required to develop virtual humans and virtual environments; methods and techniques for creating autonomous virtual human computer-generated characters that look, communicate, and behave like real people, use verbal and non-verbal communication, exhibit emotions, model their own beliefs, desires, and intentions as well as those of others, and reason using advanced artificial intelligence; and methods and techniques for improving the perception, communication, understanding, and responsiveness of virtual humans when interacting with live humans and explore how people relate to virtual humans.

This effort performs sustained multidisciplinary discovery-based research that combines state-of-the-art methods in synthetic biology with novel techniques for biologically-enabled material synthesis and characterization. This fundamental research program provides a firm foundation of biotechnological knowledge that serves as a robust platform for design and development of biologically-enabled materials and technologies for Army-relevant applications and priorities.

The focus of the HBCU/MI Research Centers of Excellence Program is to advance innovative basic research leading to potential technology development in areas of strategic importance to the Army by competitively selecting HBCU and MI research teams for grants or cooperative agreements. Awards have five-year periods of performance, with one each awarded in the areas of information, engineering, and physical science in order to support Army goals and broaden the performer base and diversify the research ecosystem.

Research will focus on material discovery for next-generation ballistic materials by using accelerated material-by-design approach to include consideration of nonhomogeneous, anisotropic, and hierarchical material systems. A data-driven material design approach will be developed utilizing high-throughput material processing and characterization, multi-scale modeling, and machine intelligence to produce leap-ahead material solutions.

The Army Educational Outreach Program (AEOP) Cooperative Agreement encompasses a cohesive and coordinated portfolio of STEM education experiences to develop, enhance, and reward students in pursuit of STEM education. This activity supports a strong partnership with government, academia and industry to leverage assets and provide a broader and deeper STEM experience for students and teachers to address the Department's, and the nation's, challenge of acquiring clearable STEM literate talent in positions throughout the workforce and in the industrial base. These activities include Army-sponsored research, education, competitions, apprenticeships, internships, and practical experiences designed to engage and guide students and teachers in Army sponsored STEM programs. AEOP has targeted efforts to reach and engage military affiliated communities in STEM initiatives to build the pool of diverse STEM competitive talent. The West Point Cadet Research Program provides West Point Cadets an opportunity to work on Army research projects alongside Army and industry scientists and engineers during the summer.

Algorithmic Game Theory, as an area of research, has had phenomenal growth since 2005 and has been used successfully in limited areas of protecting resources from adversaries (poaching, harbors, TSA, etc). That said, the exponentially growing state space, that comes from dealing with multi-echelon, multi-domain battlefields of tomorrow, and from modeling situations with unknown-unknowns, when used in military contexts will likely demand decision making at the speed of events (possibly in milliseconds) for which there are no known scientific frameworks today. The AWARE program will address the creation of frameworks for building robust set of strategies, called concepts, that can be explored by decision makers (during war-gaming or planning) to ask what-if questions by probing representations of game trees and strategy spaces, allowing for dynamic reconfiguration of decisions based on new knowledge. Finally, the AWARE program will address the gamut of modeling, inferencing, and learning to deal with knowledge of exogenous events and deception by adversaries.

This effort will rapidly accelerate the discovery of materials for extreme conditions (e.g. high strain rate, high temperatures) through the integration of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), data science, and high-throughput processes into the materials development cycle. Research will focus on data-driven materials design, high-throughput synthesis and processing, high-throughput characterization, and development of ML-augmented physics-based models.

This effort establishes the scientific framework and approaches to enable low cognitive reflexive components for robotic platform development to include the interdependencies of actuation, sensing, perception, and low cognition controls for greater resilience, efficiency, and agility. Research will focus on highly adaptive and reflexive platform components with multiple degrees of freedom capable of interacting (trip, fall, impact) with the environment without catastrophic consequences.

This effort establishes the underpinning science needed to understand how humans receive, process, and ultimately accept and reject information that leads to the formation of judgments. Individual and social constructs, the role of bias, and other cognitive and environmental factors will be incorporated. Research will address synthetic forms of intelligence, the speed and scale of information sharing, and integrating human and machine intelligence.

This CRA provides a framework across the Army to establish and sustain efforts to strengthen the incorporation of the United States Military Academy (USMA) and Senior Military Colleges faculty and cadets into the Army Modernization Enterprise (AME) through research collaborations. This CRA seeks to understand the ethical, legal, policy, and operational impacts on emerging technologies, and to build the framework to enhance personnel exchanges between the Army, USMA, and Senior Military Colleges.

These research partnerships will support basic research focused on partnerships with Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Minority Institutions (HBCUs/MIs). The focus of this effort is to advance innovative basic research in areas of strategic importance to the Army by bringing competitively selected HBCUs and MIs research teams into existing Army Collaborative Research Alliances (CRAs), Collaborative Technology Alliances (CTAs), and centers. The Army CRAs, CTAs, and centers work with Army, industry, and other academic partners to transition research to technology demonstration. These new research partnerships will provide opportunities to recruit, educate, and train outstanding students and post-doctoral researchers in science and technology areas relevant to the Army.

This research will address novel additive deposition, high fidelity subtractive methods, and high resolution directed energy processes to investigate complex, non-discrete, high performance, multi-material interfaces with improved adhesion, gradual coefficient of thermal expansion changes, and gradual wavespeed changes to enable high performance under extreme ballistic and thermal conditions.

The FTAS program serves as a catalyst for the Army to assess potentially game-changing technologies discovered in friendly foreign nations by the Army ITCs, which may meet future Army needs. The technology finds can often times be truly unique and may well meet an Army requirement or potentially support ongoing Army S&T investments. These efforts could fund international challenges/searches, international extramural research, and non-traditional international researchers to provide information useful in making early assessments of a technology's potential contributions to the Army's S&T strategy.

The ten International Technology Centers (ITCs) located in North America, South America, Asia, and Europe support the Army's goals of providing the best technology in the world to our Warfighters by leveraging the research investments in Science and Technology (S&T) of our international partners. The ITCs perform identification and assessment of international technology programs to assess their potential impact on the Army's S&T investment strategy and modernization priorities. ITC 'technology finds' are submitted to various Army S&T organizations for assessment and consideration to determine their suitability for investment through avenues such as the basic and applied research program or the Foreign Technology (and Science) Assessment Support (FTAS) Program. Highly promising research is awarded seed funding by the ITC through a grant, contract, or cooperative agreement - typically to a foreign researcher.

As a result of the Army's investment in electronic material modeling and simulation, tools are now available to predict semiconductor material and device performance with high fidelity. Through modeling and simulation, the Center for Semiconductor Modeling of Materials and Devices (CSM) assesses performance, guides improvements, and reduces technology risk for niche Department of Defense (DoD) semiconductor applications before large investment is committed. The intent of the CSM is to simulate real materials and devices in real environments, understand the limits of the technology, understand the parameters that control the performance, eliminate variances to the maximum extent possible, and arrive at a materials and device design which will reproducibly yield the required performance. Doing so at an early stage of innovation will lead to acceleration toward the next disruptive innovation. This acceleration is becoming increasingly important, because the environment is changing rapidly and to stay ahead the Army must innovate faster.

The focus of the HBCU/MI RCE Program is to enhance Army-relevant research infrastructure, talent, and ecosystems at institutions that have been underrepresented in the Army research enterprise. The program invests in innovative basic research in areas of strategic importance to the Army identified through the competitive selection of HBCU and MI research teams for grants or cooperative agreements.

By developing and validating theoretical principles of human-agent team states and processes, this effort defines methods for exploiting individual dynamics and variability to improve team-level properties and performance.

This effort focuses on basic research of Immersive Environments and spans a number of key areas to include virtual humans, three-dimensional (3D) sound and visual media to achieve more efficient and affordable training, modeling, simulation, and application solutions and tools. Research includes: investigation of techniques and methods to address the rapid development of synthetic environments and the study of perception and cognition to help direct the development of new technologies and techniques that evoke more realistic responses from users; auditory aspects of immersion to provide the sound stimulus for increasing the realism for military training and simulation devices; new computational techniques in graphics for achieving real-time photo-realistic rendering of physical and synthetic environments for training and simulations; innovative methods for automatically generating animations and gestures for virtual humans based on what is being communicated; new technologies for scanning real people and rapidly generating virtual humans which look like these people significantly reducing the time, expense, and effort required to develop virtual humans and virtual environments; methods and techniques for creating autonomous virtual human computer-generated characters that look, communicate, and behave like real people, use verbal and non-verbal communication, exhibit emotions, model their own beliefs, desires, and intentions as well as those of others, and reason using advanced artificial intelligence; and methods and techniques for improving the perception, communication, understanding, and responsiveness of virtual humans when interacting with live humans and explore how people relate to virtual humans.

This effort establishes the underpinning science needed to understand how humans receive, process, and ultimately accept and reject information that leads to the formation of judgments. Individual and social constructs, the role of bias, and other cognitive and environmental factors will be incorporated. Research will address synthetic forms of intelligence, the speed and scale of information sharing, and integrating human and machine intelligence.

This effort will rapidly accelerate the discovery of materials for extreme conditions (e.g. high strain rate, high temperatures) through the integration of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), data science, and high-throughput processes into the materials development cycle. Research will focus on data-driven materials design, high-throughput synthesis and processing, high-throughput characterization, and development of ML-augmented physics-based models.

The focus of the HBCU/MI Research Centers of Excellence Program is to advance innovative basic research leading to potential technology development in areas of strategic importance to the Army by competitively selecting HBCU and MI research teams for grants or cooperative agreements. Awards have five-year periods of performance, with one each awarded in the areas of information, engineering, and physical science in order to support Army goals and broaden the performer base and diversify the research ecosystem.

This effort performs sustained multidisciplinary discovery-based research that combines state-of-the-art methods in synthetic biology with novel techniques for biologically-enabled material synthesis and characterization. This fundamental research program provides a firm foundation of biotechnological knowledge that serves as a robust platform for design and development of biologically-enabled materials and technologies for Army-relevant applications and priorities.

Establish the underpinning science to extend the reach, situational awareness, and operational effectiveness of intelligent system and soldier teams against dynamic threats in complex and contested environments and provide technical and operational superiority through fast, intelligent, resilient, and collaborative behaviors. Research efforts will enable distributed systems to engage in complex, time-varying, and contested environments to accomplish Army missions by leveraging a mix of online adaptation and system-wide resilience.

This effort performs multidisciplinary basic research in the area of neuroscience through collaboration with the University of California at Santa Barbara.

This effort investigates Nanomaterials and Nanotechnologies for Soldier applications focused on light-weight, multifunctional nanostructured fibers and materials.

VLRCOE agreements with Pennsylvania State University, the University of Maryland, and the Georgia Institute of Technology to supplement a robust experimental and analytic basic research program in rotorcraft technologies including: Aeromechanics, Structures, Flight Dynamics and Control, Rotorcraft Design and Concepts, Vibration and Noise Control, Propulsion, Affordability, Safety and Survivability, and Naval Operations.

The ARC is an United States Army Center of Excellence for Modeling and Simulation of ground vehicles. The center relies on the collaboration of researchers from multiple universities and disciplines to bridge fundamental technology gaps in five research thrust areas of strategic importance to the Army: mobility, human factors and man-machine integration, lightweight structure and materials, power and energy, and design integration. A major integrative focus of these five areas is autonomy and manned-unmanned teaming.

The IoBT CTA seeks to gain fundamental understanding of Internet of Things (IoT) phenomena and its performance in tactical environments, ranging from sparse, remote settings to complex, dense urban environments. Research will address intelligent resourcing and influence in complex, constrained, and uncertain networks (demand from massive numbers of dynamically connected devices, limited and unpredictable connectivity, shared civilian networks, computation at or near the device), heterogeneous sensing and actuation devices (efficient, smart devices with self-organizing/preservation/directing capabilities), and variable and unreliable provenance and dynamisms of information and device signals.

This research will address the fundamental science underpinning the complex information network issues that are vital to future United States (US) / United Kingdom (UK) coalition military operations and to fully exploit the joint development of emerging technologies necessary to enable coalition operations. These efforts provide enhanced ability to perform adaptive, goal- driven, semantically-aware, distributed analytics for situational understanding in coalition operations.

This effort focuses on development of the algorithmic underpinnings of adaptive, resilient, and tactically relevant behaviors for teams of autonomous ground and aerial vehicles, which will enable multi-domain autonomous maneuver.

This work supports quantum information science basic research for next generation capabilities in entanglement-enhanced novel sensors and communications for Army dominance on the future battlefield.

This research will address novel additive deposition, high fidelity subtractive methods, and high resolution directed energy processes to investigate complex, non-discrete, high performance, multi-material interfaces with improved adhesion, gradual coefficient of thermal expansion changes, and gradual wavespeed changes to enable high performance under extreme ballistic and thermal conditions.

As a result of the Army's investment in electronic material modeling and simulation, tools are now available to predict semiconductor material and device performance with high fidelity. Through modeling and simulation, the Center for Semiconductor Modeling of Materials and Devices (CSM) assesses performance, guides improvements, and reduces technology risk for niche Department of Defense (DoD) semiconductor applications before large investment is committed. The intent of the CSM is to simulate real materials and devices in real environments, understand the limits of the technology, understand the parameters that control the performance, eliminate variances to the maximum extent possible, and arrive at a materials and device design which will reproducibly yield the required performance. Doing so at an early stage of innovation will lead to acceleration toward the next disruptive innovation. This acceleration is becoming increasingly important, because the environment is changing rapidly and to stay ahead the Army must innovate faster.

These research partnerships will support basic research focused on partnerships with Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Minority Institutions (HBCUs/MIs). The focus of this effort is to advance innovative basic research in areas of strategic importance to the Army by bringing competitively selected HBCUs and MIs research teams into existing Army Collaborative Research Alliances (CRAs), Collaborative Technology Alliances (CTAs), and centers. The Army CRAs, CTAs, and centers work with Army, industry, and other academic partners to transition research to technology demonstration. These new research partnerships will provide opportunities to recruit, educate, and train outstanding students and post-doctoral researchers in science and technology areas relevant to the Army.

This CRA provides a framework across the Army to establish and sustain efforts to strengthen the incorporation of the United States Military Academy (USMA) and Senior Military Colleges faculty and cadets into the Army Modernization Enterprise (AME) through research collaborations. This CRA seeks to understand the ethical, legal, policy, and operational impacts on emerging technologies, and to build the framework to enhance personnel exchanges between the Army, USMA, and Senior Military Colleges.

This effort establishes the scientific framework and approaches to enable low cognitive reflexive components for robotic platform development to include the interdependencies of actuation, sensing, perception, and low cognition controls for greater resilience, efficiency, and agility. Research will focus on highly adaptive and reflexive platform components with multiple degrees of freedom capable of interacting (trip, fall, impact) with the environment without catastrophic consequences.

Algorithmic Game Theory, as an area of research, has had phenomenal growth since 2005 and has been used successfully in limited areas of protecting resources from adversaries (poaching, harbors, TSA, etc). That said, the exponentially growing state space, that comes from dealing with multi-echelon, multi-domain battlefields of tomorrow, and from modeling situations with unknown-unknowns, when used in military contexts will likely demand decision making at the speed of events (possibly in milliseconds) for which there are no known scientific frameworks today. The AWARE program will address the creation of frameworks for building robust set of strategies, called concepts, that can be explored by decision makers (during war-gaming or planning) to ask what-if questions by probing representations of game trees and strategy spaces, allowing for dynamic reconfiguration of decisions based on new knowledge. Finally, the AWARE program will address the gamut of modeling, inferencing, and learning to deal with knowledge of exogenous events and deception by adversaries.

The Army Educational Outreach Program (AEOP) Cooperative Agreement encompasses a cohesive and coordinated portfolio of STEM education experiences to develop, enhance, and reward students in pursuit of STEM education. This activity supports a strong partnership with government, academia and industry to leverage assets and provide a broader and deeper STEM experience for students and teachers to address the Department's, and the nation's, challenge of acquiring clearable STEM literate talent in positions throughout the workforce and in the industrial base. These activities include Army-sponsored research, education, competitions, apprenticeships, internships, and practical experiences designed to engage and guide students and teachers in Army sponsored STEM programs. AEOP has targeted efforts to reach and engage military affiliated communities in STEM initiatives to build the pool of diverse STEM competitive talent. The West Point Cadet Research Program provides West Point Cadets an opportunity to work on Army research projects alongside Army and industry scientists and engineers during the summer.

The ten International Technology Centers (ITCs) located in North America, South America, Asia, and Europe support the Army's goals of providing the best technology in the world to our Warfighters by leveraging the research investments in Science and Technology (S&T) of our international partners. The ITCs perform identification and assessment of international technology programs to assess their potential impact on the Army's S&T investment strategy and modernization priorities. ITC 'technology finds' are submitted to various Army S&T organizations for assessment and consideration to determine their suitability for investment through avenues such as the basic and applied research program or the Foreign Technology (and Science) Assessment Support (FTAS) Program. Highly promising research is awarded seed funding by the ITC through a grant, contract, or cooperative agreement - typically to a foreign researcher.

The FTAS program serves as a catalyst for the Army to assess potentially game-changing technologies discovered in friendly foreign nations by the Army ITCs, which may meet future Army needs. The technology finds can often times be truly unique and may well meet an Army requirement or potentially support ongoing Army S&T investments. These efforts could fund international challenges/searches, international extramural research, and non-traditional international researchers to provide information useful in making early assessments of a technology's potential contributions to the Army's S&T strategy.

This effort coordinates, conducts, and accelerates basic research to address Army-specific challenges, with a focus on advancing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities for autonomous maneuver in multi-domain operations (MDO). A broad-spectrum of AI capabilities are critical to the integration of operations in the contested environment including human-agent teaming for faster and more informed decisions, multi-domain Command, Control, Communications, and Computers (C4) that is resilient to Cyber Electromagnetic Activities (CEMA), and AI enabled cyber security that is robust to enemy deception. The Army will leverage existing High Performance Computing (HPC) and network infrastructure, along with regional laboratory extensions to enable basic research on AI that is open, with top-tier universities, commercial businesses, and established Department of Defense industrial partners. The A2I2 creates an accessible database of heterogeneous data, a repository of AI and ML algorithms and software tools, and military-relevant challenge problems.

The Army Advanced Biological Control Center will develop a fundamental knowledge base for precise, reliable control of engineered biological systems for functional effect during military operations. By exploiting fundamental relationships governing the functions and properties of biological systems, the center will develop advanced control schemes using synthetic biology targeting two key areas: 1) Genetic Control of Material Properties and 2) Biological Control in Competitive Environments.

The Army Advanced Energetics Center will develop a fundamental knowledge base for greater than 5x lethality and range of guns and projectiles through the discovery of disruptive energetic materials and exceeding the strategic objectives of current programs. This research focuses on high through-put synthesis and rapid characterization to accelerate discovery of next generation materials to enable Army domination of the future battlefield.

Research will focus on material discovery for next-generation ballistic materials by using accelerated material-by-design approach to include consideration of nonhomogeneous, anisotropic, and hierarchical material systems. A data-driven material design approach will be developed utilizing high-throughput material processing and characterization, multi-scale modeling, and machine intelligence to produce leap-ahead material solutions.