Following Team GatorWings’ initial top-ten showing at Phase 1 of the DARPA Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2) in 2017, the team came in fifth place overall in the second preliminary event in the competition. As in Phase I, DARPA awarded each team US $750,000 in order to prepare their AIs for a final round of competition in October 2019.

From the SC2 website:

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 ECE Florida GatorWings team is comprised of Dr. Tan Wong, Dr. John Shea, and their students. The team ultimately were able to pass the “Payline,” and were able to prove not only that AIs could collaborate to manage spectrum, but that it was more effective than the current method of chopping spectrum into defined bands.

Learn more about the challenge on the IEEE Spectrum website or the video below.