The DARPA Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2) aims to ensure that the exponentially growing number of military and civilian wireless devices will have full access to the increasingly crowded electromagnetic spectrum.

In this first-of-its-kind collaborative machine-learning competition, competitors will reimagine new spectrum access strategies in which radio networks autonomously collaborate to dynamically determine how the radio frequency (RF) spectrum should be used moment to moment, avoiding interference and jointly exploiting opportunities. SC2 teams will develop these breakthrough capabilities by taking advantage of recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, and the expanding capacities of software-defined radios.

The team whose radio design most reliably achieves successful communication in the presence of other competing radios could win as much as $3,500,000.