The Internet of Battlefield Things Collaborative Research Alliance (IoBT-CRA), also known as the Internet of Battlefield Things Research on Evolving Intelligent Goal-driven Networks (IoBT REIGN), is a collaborative research alliance between government, industry, and university researchers for the purposes of developing a fundamental understanding of a dynamic, goal-driven Internet of Military Things (IoMT) known as the Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT). It was first established by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) to investigate the use of

machine intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech rec ...

and smart technology on the battlefield as well as strengthen the collaboration between

autonomous agent An autonomous agent is an intelligent agent operating on a user's behalf but without any interference of that user. An intelligent agent, however appears according to an IBM white paper as: Intelligent agents are software entities that carry out ...

s and human soldiers in combat. An initial grant of $25 million was provided by ARL in October 2017 to fund the first five years of this potential 10-year research program. The research effort is a collaboration between ARL and Carnegie Mellon University, the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

, the

University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California S ...

, the

University of Massachusetts The University of Massachusetts is the five-campus public university system and the only public research system in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The university system includes five campuses (Amherst, Boston, Dartmouth, Lowell, and a medical ...

, the

University of Southern California , mottoeng = "Let whoever earns the palm bear it" , religious_affiliation = Nonsectarian—historically Methodist , established = , accreditation = WSCUC , type = Private research university , academic_affiliations = , endowment = $8.1 ...

Georgetown University Georgetown University is a private university, private research university in the Georgetown (Washington, D.C.), Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Founded by Bishop John Carroll (archbishop of Baltimore), John Carroll in 1789 as Georg ...

, and

SRI International SRI International (SRI) is an American nonprofit scientific research institute and organization headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The trustees of Stanford University established SRI in 1946 as a center of innovation to support economic ...

with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) acting as the consortium lead.

Goals

The IoBT-CRA was created as part of the

U.S. Army The United States Army (USA) is the land service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the eight U.S. uniformed services, and is designated as the Army of the United States in the U.S. Constitution.Article II, section 2, cl ...

’s long-term plans to keep up with technological advances in commercial industry and better prepare for future

electronic warfare Electronic warfare (EW) is any action involving the use of the electromagnetic spectrum (EM spectrum) or directed energy to control the spectrum, attack an enemy, or impede enemy assaults. The purpose of electronic warfare is to deny the opponen ...

against more technologically sophisticated adversaries. In light of this objective, the IoBT-CRA focuses on exploring the capabilities of intelligent battlefield systems and large-scale heterogeneous sensor networks that dynamically evolve in real-time in order to adapt to Army mission needs. Part of the CRA research is dedicated to enhancing modern intelligent sensor and actuator capacity, allowing them to be compatible with secure military-owned networks, less trustworthy civilian networks, and adversarial networks. ARL identified six areas of research that the IoBT-CRA should strive to develop as part of its program: * Agile Synthesis: Theoretical models and methods of autonomic complex systems that provide the capacity to enable fast and effective command over military, adversary, and civilian networks. * Reflexes: Theoretical models and methods for structuring dynamic IoBTs that perform adaptive, autonomic, and self-aware behavior at varying ranges of scale, distribution, resource constraints, and heterogeneity. * Intelligent Battlefield Services: Scientific theories that will help improve the fundamental run-time capabilities of IoBTs with tasks such as information collection, predictive processing, and data anomaly detection. * Security: Methods of increasing the defenses of IoBTs such that the system is resilient to attacks and tampering from adversaries and is able to continue operating under less-than-ideal situations. * Dependability: Fundamental models related to asset composition, system adaptation, and intelligent services that are all aimed to increase the reliability of IoBTs in largely uncertain environments. * Experimentation: The architectural foundations for the IoBT seek to evaluate how well theories, algorithms, and technologies perform under various military-related scenarios for the purpose of addressing issues regarding scale, composability, and compatibility.

External links

IoBT REIGN Homepage

List of IoBT-CRA publications

U.S. Army Research Laboratory IoBT webpage

References

{{reflist Military technology Internet of things Digital technology