Award Data

This proposal will investigate body armor systems to the effects of burst fire. In Phase I, the team of researchers will investigate the spatial distribution of impacts of common burst fire capable rifles, demonstrate a statistical analysis technique, and demonstrate a ballistic model approach while applying this research to a surrogate body armor solution. The program will begin with an analysi ...

Spontaneous emission is a quantum mechanical process that represents the main source of phase noise in state-of-the-art semiconductor lasers, limiting their coherence, and their suitability for high-speed communication and sensing applications. This proposal aims to develop ultra-high coherence semiconductor lasers on the Silicon/III-V platform with a quantum linewidth of

Empirical-based mathematical framework and computer algorithms, for representing human perception and cognition processes and limitations, which influence the recognition of salient information about rapidly changing events.

As the warfighter is increasingly using more highly integrated instruments, e.g. a laser rangefinder (LRF) combined with a laser designator and an imager, the need to decrease the size of these components becomes more important. Compact small munition applications of rangefinders particularly place an emphasis on size of the optical front end. In order to make the transceiver more compact, speci ...

Recent demand for short-range communications has risen sharply for both the defense and commercial sectors. Tactical communications with a deployed sensor network require secure short-range communications and high network density to enable robust data fusion and collaborative sensing for enhanced situation awareness for the war fighters. The THz nano-radio technology being developed in this projec ...

Assured position, navigation and time (PNT) require constant vigilance against intentional and unintentional sources of coherent and non-coherent interference. The Global Positioning System (GPS) is especially vulnerable to attacks and must be defended through electronic protection (EP) measures such as anti-jam (AJ) and anti-spoof (AS). The proposed effort will design and demonstrate GPS-based at ...

As the carry and protective gear of the modern war fighter increases, the burden on the human body will necessarily increase. In our present TALOS MkIII project, we are developing lower body augmentation to preserve speed and agility while bearing this weight. Yet we cannot ignore the impact of this weight on the upper body: in this project we propose to develop an upper body exoskeleton with p ...

Clinical monitoring of mental health status has not evolved much from the routine meeting between patient and clinician, which suffers from a lack of quantification, irregular and anecdotal reporting, and does not necessarily include input from family. This is unfortunate given current technology, in which people routinely volunteer to track their own health related behavior, such as exercise and ...

A critical aspect of exoskeleton control that has to date introduced a performance limitation is the ability of the exoskeleton to recognize the intent of the operator so it can apply assistance to their desired motion. This intent recognition effort is typically solved using ad-hoc methods where subject matter experts make design decisions and tune transitions to identify intended maneuvers as re ...

Laboratory investigations have suggested that acoustically or vibrationally inducing motion in buried targets can aid in improving target detectability through a characteristic response related to differential target motion. This gain is realized by adding an additional degree of freedom, modulation due to motion in the GPR return signal, to use as a discriminating feature. The AKELA team is propo ...