Award Data

In Phase II of PLATO, we will develop a prototype plan and goal identification system that employs a rich model of domain actions and events, extracted automatically from a massive amount of real-world domain-relevant information, to model agent-specific action costs and to process sequences of agent actions and events, extracted from text, as an agent plan in progress. The system will be able to ...

Neutron coincidence counters are currently based on 3H technology. A worldwide 3He shortage plus the need for significant improvements in performance necessitate the development of a new class of neutron detectors. We propose the use of boron-coated straw

Proposal title: Resilient Wayside Structures to Reduce Severity of Passenger Equipment Collisions and Derailments Additional passenger fatalities/injuries can occur during derailments involving interaction with wayside structures. Analogously, automobile fatalities often result from interaction of vehicles with roadside structures; personnel hazard reduction is a key design criterion for roadsid ...

Proposal title: Rapid Assessment of Air Void System in Fresh Concrete Water expansion during freeze-thaw cycles can cause deterioration in concrete, leading to scaling, cracking, and crumbling over a period of years. Resistance to this damage is achieved with a system of voids formed by adding surfactants to the fresh concrete to stabilize air bubbles naturally entrained during mixing. The volume ...

Proposal title: Broken Rail Detection from Flashing Rear End Device Broken rails are a common cause of mainline derailments and a particular concern given the increasing use of our rail system for passenger traffic and petroleum products. The progressive nature of the defects provides an opportunity for early detection of cracks before they become significant enough to cause a derailment. Unfortu ...

In Phase I of this effort we analyzed the structural response of a BLU 109 during typical penetration events. Based on these finite element results, we proposed and demsonstrated a simple robust concept for a passive penetrator sensor that identifies the material being penetrated and also correlates strongly with its underground trajectory. Such a sensor would obviously provide valuable informatio ...

Orora Design Technologies proposes to develop electronic design automation (EDA) tools employing minimally invasive circuit design-based methods to mitigate single event effects (SEEs) for next generation Ultra-DSM CMOS (

The TEXAS Model for Intersection Traffic is a high-quality single-intersection microscopic traffic simulation model developed at The University of Texas at Austin. It analyzes in sub microscopic detail the behavior of driver-vehicle units as they go through an intersection and intermix with other traffic flows. It has detailed intersection geometry, path following, microscopic car following, lan ...

Radiation tolerant Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA’s) have gained wide and rapid acceptance by military and aerospace equipment suppliers; however, there are presently a limited number of chip-sets available for production and they are limited to one time programming; hence if program changes are subsequently required a backup or chip replacement is required. The lack of FPGA alternatives ...

More than 1,300,000 Level 1 commercial vehicle inspections - a safety-critical, time-consuming, often difficult and painstaking process, especially as regards the brake inspection component -- are performed every year in the United States, under all sorts of weather and lighting conditions. The current technology used adds to the complexity and error potential inherent in this important task. In ...