Award Data

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 ...

In the setting of altitude-induced hypoxia, operator cognitive capacity degrades and can compromise both individual and team performance. This degradation is linked to falling brain energy (ATP) levels and an increased reliance on anaerobic energy production from glucose. Ketone bodies are the evolutionary alternative substrate to glucose for brain metabolic requirements; previous studies have sho ...

Special Operations Forces (SOF) are an integral aspect of the US military. SOF operators are among the most elite and highly qualified individuals in the U.S. military. As such, extraordinary physical and mental demands are placed upon them to excel in extreme environments for extended periods of time. This unrelenting cycle of combat deployments and intense pre-deployment training shortens the fu ...

A critical step in the extraction of elements from ore, especially rare earth elements that are found in complex minerals, is separation. Froth flotation is a highly versatile method for physically separating particles based on differences in the ability of air bubbles to selectively adhere to specific mineral surfaces in a mineral/water slurry. The particles with attached air bubbles are then ca ...

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.

Face recognition performance using deep learning has seen dramatic improvements in recent years. This improvement has been fueled in part by the curation of large labeled training datasets with millions of images of hundreds of thousands of subjects.This results in effective generalization for matching over pose, illumination, expression and age variation, however these datasets have traditionally ...

The objective of this proposal is to develop instrumentation and algorithms for acquiring facial features for facial recognition in low- and no-light conditions.We will use cross-spectrum matching by exploiting infrared polarimetric imagery which tends to show features that match more closely visible imagery than conventional infrared.In addition to thermal infrared, we will also test subjects in ...

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 ...