Area of Interest - Unified Combat Teaming.docx

This AoI invites solution briefs that address the full spectrum of enabling technologies required to achieve unified combat teaming, spanning system modularity, common control and data standards, autonomous mission execution, and human-machine collaboration. The Army is not seeking a single proprietary autonomy stack, control station, or platform sold in isolation; it is seeking the connective architecture, control, and integration capability that lets systems the Army already owns or licenses, and systems it will acquire from many vendors, operate as one controllable force.

GVSC's central and persistent challenge in this area is scaling the size and diversity of the autonomous team. Accordingly, GVSC places strong value on approaches that can be demonstrated and evaluated on a small number of physical platforms and then extended in scale and complexity through modeling and simulation. Offerors must be able to demonstrate their capability on real platforms and should describe how they use simulation to extend results beyond the number of systems that can be fielded for a given test. GVSC values a capability that proves itself convincingly on few physical systems, with a credible simulation-supported path to larger formations, over a capability that requires a large physical fleet to show any result.

Enabling and Technical Workstreams GVSC has identified three enabling workstreams and three technical workstreams that collectively underpin the Unified Combat Teaming thrust area. Proposals may address one or more of the technical workstreams. Where a proposed technical capability depends on architecture, interfaces, or integration, that dependency should conform to the enabling workstreams, particularly the Modular Open Systems Approach (EW1), but offerors are not required to deliver against every enabling workstream. Integrated solutions spanning multiple workstreams are strongly encouraged.

Enabling Workstream 1 (EW1): Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) Achieving interoperability across a diverse fleet of autonomous platforms including unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), unmanned aerial systems (UAS), and autonomous surface/subsurface assets requires a foundational commitment to open, modular architectures. Unified combat teaming is only sustainable if any system in the team can be replaced or upgraded without re-engineering the rest of the team. The defining requirement of this workstream is severability: the ability to remove a prior system and incorporate a new one from any vendor at foundational levels of the architecture. GVSC seeks solutions that embrace Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) principles to ensure that autonomous combat teaming systems are hardware-agnostic, software-composable, and vendor-independent.

The decisive question for this workstream is: how readily can a new system become part of any of the technical workstream efforts below, and how cleanly can an existing system be severed and replaced? Where dependencies between systems are unavoidable, those dependencies must rest on standards or interfaces that are open and that any other vendor is free to build to rather than proprietary couplings that only the original offeror can satisfy.

Areas of particular interest include:

· Open architecture frameworks enabling plug-and-play integration of autonomous subsystems from multiple vendors across the ground, air, and sea domain boundary

· Architectures that allow a system to be severed and replaced, or upgraded, without re-qualifying or re-engineering the rest of the team, with the resulting dependencies resting only on open, publicly buildable interfaces

· Compliance with or advancement of relevant open standards

· Scalable solutions that support rapid integration of new autonomy algorithms without full system re-qualification

· Approaches that reduce total lifecycle cost through reuse, modularity, and competitive upgrade paths for autonomy software and hardware components

· A demonstrated method for integrating a platform or subsystem the offeror did not build All solutions proposed to the technical workstreams below should have a strong MOSA underpinning that can be clearly conveyed and incorporated into the areas of particular interest within this Enabling Workstream. GVSC is interested in MOSA as a working, demonstrated capability rather than as a compliance assertion; offerors should be prepared to show the architecture accepting third-party components and releasing a prior one in its place.

Enabling Workstream 2 (EW2): Use of Common Control & Data Standards Unified combat teaming requires that all elements of a heterogeneous autonomous force, regardless of manufacturer or platform type, share a common operational picture and respond to a unified command structure. GVSC seeks solutions that establish or leverage common control and data standards to enable cross-platform coordination, data fusion, and command authority across significant numbers of unmanned nodes in the battlespace.

Areas of particular interest include:

· A demonstration of two dissimilar systems from different vendors exchanging command, status, and sensor data and presenting a single shared operational picture

· Implementation and advancement of interoperability standards including JAUS (Joint Architecture for Unmanned Systems), DDS (Data Distribution Service), TAK (Team Awareness Kit), and NATO STANAG-aligned control protocols, where these are used to achieve cross-vendor interoperation rather than asserted as compliance alone

· Demonstrated use of unified data models and ontologies for multi-domain situational awareness that enable disparate autonomous agents to maintain a shared, machine-readable operational picture

· Secure, low-latency communications architectures supporting command and control in contested and degraded environments, including resilience to electronic warfare (EW) and GPS-denied conditions

· Cross-domain data brokering capabilities that allow ground, aerial, and sea/subsurface autonomous systems to share sensor data, threat tracks, and mission status in real time without manual mediation

· Standardized Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that allow third-party mission systems, payloads, and autonomy stacks to interface with the unified combat team control architecture In their technical workstream proposals, offerors should describe how their proposed standards approach has been validated in multi-vendor, multi-platform environments including platforms the offeror did not produce and articulate the pathway to scalable Army adoption.

Enabling Workstream 3 (EW3): Platform Onboarding & Integration Toolkit Unified combat teaming depends not only on open architectures and common standards, but on the practical ability to bring a new vendor platform onto the teaming architecture quickly and repeatably. The engineering effort required to take a system from "vendor product" to functioning "team member" is frequently where multi-vendor teaming succeeds or fails. GVSC seeks solutions that materially reduce this integration lift and make onboarding of heterogeneous, multi-vendor air, ground, and sea assets a routine, repeatable activity rather than a bespoke effort per platform.

Areas of particular interest include:

· Tooling and software development kits (SDKs) that reduce the engineering effort required to bring a new vendor platform onto the teaming architecture, with a clear, repeatable onboarding path

· A capability-abstraction model that describes what any asset can do, such as sense, move, carry, effect, so the teaming architecture reasons over capability rather than platform make and model

· Dynamic service discovery and registration so the team knows, in real time, which capabilities are present, degraded, or lost as assets join, depart, or are attrited

· Translation of platform-native autonomy, control, and telemetry interfaces into the common command and status vocabulary used by the teaming architecture

· Validation and conformance tooling that confirms a newly onboarded asset behaves correctly within the team before mission use

· Secure onboarding mechanisms that authenticate and authorize a platform when it joins the teaming architecture, establish trust before it is granted command, status, or data access, and revoke that access cleanly when the platform departs or is compromised

· Approaches that demonstrably onboard a platform the offeror did not build Offerors should describe the integration effort their approach requires for a representative third-party platform, including a realistic estimate of the time and engineering level of effort to take that platform from "product" to "team member", and articulate how that effort scales as the diversity of the fleet grows. GVSC is interested in onboarding as a demonstrated, repeatable capability rather than a one-time integration; submissions whose approach applies only to the offeror's own platforms are of limited interest.

Technical Workstream 1 (TW1): Dynamic Task Allocation and Mission Planning/Coordination Algorithms Supporting Scalable Multi-Agent Teaming Behaviors Unified combat teaming at operationally meaningful scale requires that autonomous systems self-organize, adapt task assignments in real time, and coordinate complex multi-agent behaviors without continuous human micromanagement. GVSC seeks algorithmic solutions that enable dynamic task allocation and mission planning capable of producing coherent, group-level teaming behaviors across heterogeneous autonomous teams. The capability matured here also underpins assured operations at scale; within Unified Combat Teaming, it is the technical workstream that must exist for a Soldier to direct a multi-vendor formation as one team rather than as many platforms.

GVSC recognizes this is a difficult, growth-oriented capability and does not expect a fully mature, large-scale solution at entry. A strong submission may begin with a small, tractable teaming behavior demonstrated convincingly on a small number of real platforms and present a clear, evidenced path by which that behavior grows in agent count, heterogeneity, and tactical complexity. GVSC is more interested in a sound foundation with a credible growth path than in a broad claim spanning every behavior below.

Areas of particular interest include:

· Decentralized multi-agent task allocation algorithms that dynamically assign and re-assign mission roles, including reconnaissance, overwatch, suppression, logistics, and breach, based on real-time assessment of threat, terrain, asset availability, and mission priority

· Mission planning engines capable of generating and continuously re-optimizing coordinated courses of action for mixed manned-unmanned teams operating across ground, air, and sea domains simultaneously

· Coordination algorithms that produce coherent collective behaviors, including adaptive formation control, distributed search, collaborative target detection and tracking, and mutual protection geometries, from local agent-level decision rules without centralized orchestration

· Autonomous trade-off behaviors that weigh competing costs (such as energy, attrition, time, compute) against benefits (such as connectivity, sensing, coherence, tempo) and act on the trade; for example, deciding whether to redirect an agent to relay data versus preserve it for its primary task

· A foundational set of teaming behaviors expressed as composable primitives that a learning-based approach can build into more complex, adaptive tactics, rather than a fixed library of hand-authored maneuvers

· Approaches (including biologically inspired, game-theoretic, or learning-based methods) applied to realistic military task environments

· Fault-tolerant mission execution frameworks that maintain team coherence and mission continuity in the presence of individual platform losses, communication disruptions, or sensor degradation

· Scalable algorithms validated across team sizes ranging from small tactical elements (3–10 agents) toward operationally significant formations (50+ heterogeneous agents, with a path toward hundreds)

· Integration with physics-based and constructive simulation environments to support rapid algorithm development, validation, and Army experimentation prior to live-environment demonstration GVSC is specifically interested in solutions that have moved beyond laboratory demonstration and can be evaluated in hardware-in-the-loop or live-environment settings within 6-12 months of award. Consistent with the growth path above, GVSC expects offerors to use modeling and simulation to demonstrate behavior at larger scale than is practical on physical hardware, while validating the underlying behavior on a smaller number of real platforms; offerors should describe how their simulation results give confidence that the behavior will hold on physical systems as more are gradually added to physical experimentations. GVSC seeks coordination capability that degrades gracefully and rebalances as the formation changes; fixed-script, fixed-count, single-vendor demonstrations are of limited interest.

Technical Workstream 2 (TW2): Human-Machine Teaming Enhancements Autonomous systems operating as unified combat teams must function not only with one another but in genuine partnership with human warfighters by augmenting human judgment, reducing cognitive load, and maintaining appropriate human decision authority over consequential actions. GVSC seeks solutions that meaningfully advance the state of Human-Machine Teaming for autonomous multidomain systems operating in complex, high-tempo combat environments.

The capability GVSC values here is enabling a single Soldier or small crew to effectively direct a growing number of autonomous agents without a corresponding growth in workload or training burden. Offerors should center their submission on this outcome.

Areas of particular interest include:

· Intuitive multimodal operator interfaces that enable a single soldier or small crew to supervise, redirect, and selectively delegate authority to teams of autonomous agents across ground, air, and sea domains simultaneously

· Supervision approaches that hold per-Soldier workload roughly constant as the number of supervised agents grows, rather than scaling operator burden with team size

· Adaptive autonomy frameworks that dynamically adjust the level of machine autonomy, from fully supervised teleoperation through collaborative teaming to supervised autonomous execution of a team or wolfpack, based on mission phase, threat level, communications availability, and operator cognitive state

· AI-driven decision support tools that present synthesized mission options, predicted outcomes, and confidence assessments to human commanders in formats that support rapid, informed decision-making without overwhelming cognitive capacity

· Natural language and intuitive gesture-based command interfaces that lower the training burden for warfighters tasked with directing autonomous combat teams

· Transparency and explainability mechanisms that provide human operators with meaningful insight into the rationale behind autonomous agent decisions, enabling trust calibration and effective intervention

· Workload monitoring and adaptive task offloading capabilities that detect operator overload and proactively redistribute supervisory responsibilities between the human and the autonomous system Solutions should demonstrate measurable improvements in operator effectiveness, decision cycle time, and mission outcome quality relative to current manned or remotely operated baselines and should be supported by human factors research and operational experimentation data where available. Because the central outcome concerns supervising a growing team, offerors should describe how this is evaluated with physical systems at the scale available, and how simulation is used to assess operator workload as the team grows beyond that.

Technical Workstream 3 (TW3): Teaming Experimentation, Instrumentation & Evaluation Harness The role of GVSC science and technology is to integrate and experiment with physical instantiations of autonomous teaming systems to answer the hard questions of what tactical behaviors these teams must execute and what core system requirements enable those behaviors. Realizing this depends on the ability to instrument, exercise, measure, replay, and compare teaming behavior rigorously across simulation and physical systems, and across competing approaches. GVSC seeks solutions that provide the experimentation and evaluation harness through which unified combat teaming capability can be assessed, iterated, and matured.

Areas of particular interest include:

· Instrumentation to record, replay, and compare formation behavior across configurations and runs, enabling apples-to-apples evaluation of competing teaming approaches

· Event-injection capability, including asset loss, new asset arrival, communications degradation, GPS denial, and re-tasking, with measurement of formation response, recovery, and tempo

· Metrics frameworks for team controllability, operator workload, tasking-to-execution latency, and formation coherence, tied to tactical task accomplishment rather than component-level performance alone

· Hardware-in-the-loop and live/virtual/constructive (LVC) integration so the same teaming software can be exercised consistently in simulation and on physical systems, supporting sim-to-real iteration

· Methods for establishing confidence that behavior observed in simulation will transfer to physical platforms (sim-to-real fidelity), so that simulation can be trusted to extend results beyond what is practical to test live

· Data capture and provenance suitable for feeding behavior iteration and learning-based refinement of teaming approaches

· Reproducible test conditions and scenario management that allow a given teaming approach to be evaluated under controlled, repeatable circumstances GVSC is interested in the harness as a means to answer experimentation questions, not as an isolated software tool; offerors should describe how their approach supports rigorous comparison of teaming approaches and integrates with physical autonomous systems within operationally relevant timeframes. Solutions that have been used to evaluate multi-agent or multi-vendor teaming behavior, and that can be exercised in hardware-in-the-loop or live-environment settings within 6-12 months of award, are of particular interest.