DARPA Picks Finalists in Radio Frequency Competition

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has selected the finalists for a competition that seeks to promote the usage of radio frequency technology through artificial intelligence approaches. DARPA said Tuesday that ten teams will present their radio designs at the Mobile World Congress Los Angeles event in October as part of the Spectrum Collaboration Challenge’s final phase.

SC2 participants were tasked to develop autonomous radio networks through the use of machine learning, software-defined radio technologies and AI methods. The winner will receive $2M in cash, while the second and third place winners will get $1M and $750,000 respectively.

“The novel approaches developed by our competitors could enable us to make more efficient use of the spectrum we currently have available, and possibly forestall spectrum scarcity that threatens future performance as more and more devices come online,” said Paul Tilghman, program manager of SC2 at DARPA.

The finalists are:

• Andersons
• Dragon Radio, Drexel University
• Erebus
• GatorWings, University of Florida
• How Make Radio, Agitator
• MarmotE, Vanderbilt University
• SCATTER, IDLab
• Sodium-24
• Sprite, Northeastern University
• Zylinium