Low-Cost Optical Systems Technology (LOW-COST)

The Air Force Research Laboratory is looking to apply novel concepts in optical technologies to compact EO/IR systems and sensors engineered for attritable and low-cost, small, unmanned aircraft systems. The Low-COST Program has the objective of greatly reducing the cost, size, and weight of the optical systems used by the US Air Force on assets employed in highly contested environments. This will be accomplished as we implement, mature, and demonstrate new advances in meta-optics to realize increased system performance through hybrid and planar optic system. Specifically, exploiting the capability of highly configurable meta-optic system to work in concert with computational imaging and subsequent processing to demonstrate increases overall specific system performance outside of imaging applications is a primary goal of the program. This will provide a new capability for active and passive EO/IR sensors, addressing primarily small and attritable UAS platforms and providing autonomous sensing capabilities such as incoming missile warning, laser warning, and infrared search & track (IRST). These capabilities advance our current sensing concepts and currently do not exist at cost, size, and weight benchmarks that would be compatible with small UASs (SUASs) and attritable