The Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) is serving up a new solicitation for its SOUP – Sensing Operation Using Prediction – program, seeking proposals to develop advanced AI technologies that strengthen the military’s intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities.
Published on SAM.gov on April 14, the solicitation outlines SOUP’s goals: developing new algorithms for tracking and sensor resource management; modifying existing algorithms; conducting experiments to evaluate combat identification (CID) effectiveness; integrating with other CID improvement efforts; and simulating scenarios to measure algorithm performance.
The SOUP program has an estimated budget of $3 million, with awards expected on July 25. While some information is publicly available, full details are restricted under controlled unclassified information. Interested vendors must request the complete report from the Air Force.
The proposals are due by May 14.
The one-stop call for proposals is part of AFRL’s Autonomous Decisions, Algorithms, and Modeling (ADAM) announcement – released in March – which supports the Sensors Directorate’s continued progress from basic research to technology maturation and transition.
Under ADAM, AFRL aims to improve sensing management across ISR, strike, electronic warfare, and cyber operations by enhancing the collection, communication, and processing of sensor data. Key objectives include anticipatory response generation, optimized sensor resource planning and scheduling, and flexible control across distributed sensing systems.
“Efforts will focus on technologies including sensing interface/architecture development and assessment, experimentation, sensing decision-making strategies, representation, sensing data and knowledge management, cross-mode sensor management and registration, distributed processing, and joint inference and control,” officials wrote in the announcement.