BAE Systems said on Aug. 31 the company has received a new $6.5 million deal from DARPA to continue work developing new software that will “enable semi-autonomous, multi-domain mission planning.”

The Phase 2 award for the Adapting Cross-Domain Kill-Webs, or ACK, program will focus on continuing to mature the Multi-domain Adaptive Request Service software after successful demonstration of the tool’s capability during the first phase.

“Autonomy is a critical enabler for multi-domain mission planning. The Phase 2 award will focus on advancing the software designed for military operators to leverage battlespace resources from across various domains, including space, air, land, and sea, for more effective, efficient missions,” Chris Eisenbies, product line director for BAE Systems’ Autonomy, Controls and Estimation Group, said in a statement. 

BAE Systems noted its FAST Labs team developed the software along with Carnegie Mellon University and Canadian firm Uncharted Software, and said the solution is able to adapt “a plan with 100s of missions to insert tasks against new targets, requiring only fractions of a second per target added.”

“The Phase 1 demonstration highlighted the software’s ability to update a plan in real time during a live exercise by ingesting information feeds to track the state of planned tasks, and then generating options to adapt the plan to insert new tasks,” the company wrote in a statement. “Under Phase 2, BAE Systems will continue to mature and advance the software to scale up the capabilities designed to help operators make informed decisions by automatically identifying available assets across domains, and then rapidly assessing the costs and benefits of using those assets when adapting mission tasks.”

Subsequent work on the program will build toward demonstrating the Multi-domain Adaptive Request Service software “in a full scale, operationally realistic setting,” according to BAE Systems.