Award Data

The harsh environment posed by hypersonic flight makes antenna design challenging due to extreme temperature exposure coupled with often competing mechanical/aero and RF performance requirements. FIRST RF proposes an advancement to its numerous conformal antenna technologies utilizing additive manufacturing of dielectric materials. This approach will decouple the competing RF and mechanical requir ...

Estes Energetics and Battelle Memorial Institute will apply a fast, affordable manufacturing technology—proven to Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 4 and Manufacturing Readiness Level (MRL) 4—that manufactures a layer of carbon-carbon directly on composite structures without requiring use of an autoclave or densification process holds, resulting in reduced manufacturing time while improving com ...

This topic focuses on developing fast-running, computationally efficient, surrogate models to be used in place of slow running, computationally expensive, high-fidelity physics-based models inside of end-to-end missile defense simulation frameworks. Recent advances in physics informed machine learning (PIML) have made possible the substantial speed improvement of physics-based models. Corvid Techn ...

Numerica proposes to leverage extensive expertise in advanced battle management algorithms, advanced guidance and control algorithms, hypersonic defense, and high-g missile threat modelling to develop a physics-based, real-time prototype battle management and advanced guidance algorithm that produces optimal launch scheduling and optimal guidance for mid-trajectory interception of hypersonic threa ...

The Ultimate Goal of these research efforts is to develop ALLVAR Alloy athermalizing strut components that enable size, weight, cost, lead time, and performance enhancements of SiC mirrored optical seekers that must withstand extreme exo-atmosphere, endo-atmosphere, and mechanical loading environments. ALLVAR Alloys offer a brand-new strong and ductile support structure solution that can offer low ...

In Phase I, our team of Kitware and UC-Berkeley developed Scale-MAE by adding ground sample distance (GSD) to positional encodings, and produced a multiscale representation that achieves state-of-the art results across image classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection tasks. In Phase II, we will create a remote sensing pretraining toolkit to enable fast and easy experimentation wit ...

The Missile Defense Agency (MDA) has a need to decrease the yield time and increase the through put of optical ceramic conformal windows. Optical manufacturing has been a rapidly growing field with advancements in all technology spectrums. High performance optical systems are needed in aerospace, defense, medical, and commercial components. Industry is requiring these components to be manufactured ...

An AI/ML-enabled simulation optimization tool can exploit existing simulation models to streamline the scenario planning and analysis process. Our Phase II project will focus on using AI/ML techniques and simulation optimization to solve the problem of generating a minimal collection of test scenarios, using the minimum number of shared scenario components that meets a required set of test objecti ...

OptTek will apply our novel mapping, adaptive sampling, and optimization capabilities to help MDA better understand the operational effectiveness of the MDS under multi-threat missile raids. While digital simulations provide faster feedback on missile defense performance than a ground test, the computational costs are still too high to handle the combinatorial explosion of parameter combinations a ...

Under the Phase I effort, NAVSYS developed a design for an alternative navigation (ALTNAV) external aiding solution that utilizes signals of opportunity (SoOP) from a combination of commercial and military space systems leveraging NAVSYS PNT as a Service (PNTaaS) technology developed under contract to DARPA, Air Force, and Navy customers. Under the Phase II effort, we propose to build and test a P ...