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 ...

Flow Pharma, Inc. is a biotechnology company in the San Francisco Bay Area developing fully synthetic cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL)stimulating peptide vaccines for Marburg virus. The FlowVax vaccine platform allows us to create dry powder formulations of biodegradablemicrospheres and TLR adjuvants incorporating class I and class II T cell epitopes. FlowVax vaccines can be designed for delivery by i ...

A new dual pump hydraulic supply designed to enable energetically autonomous exoskeleton robots will be developed, tested and demonstrated. This new hydraulic supply will be integrated with a high performance hydraulically actuated full body exoskeleton robot and used to test and demonstrate the overall performances of such systems. New control policies that include: (i) an assist mode, where the ...

The focus of this STTR phase I component is on proof-of-concept studies demonstrating applicability of technical approaches for identificationof circulatory diagnostic markers for infectious disease. Therefore, the primary objective of this project is to determine feasibility of one suchtechnical approach called Proteomics-based Expression Library Screening (PELS), for identification of pathogen-d ...

There are currently no vaccines or therapeutics available for Marburg Virus Disease (MVD). Given the specter of weaponization and the terriblemorbidity and high mortality rate of MVD, this represents a critical threat to the operational readiness of the Warfighter. While traditionalvaccines have proven to be a huge contribution to public health, they do have some limitations especially in the cont ...

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 ...