Award Data

Environmental Fuel Research, LLC (EFR-LLC), has demonstrated the technical feasibility of separating fats, oils, and greases (FOG) from grease trap waste (GTW) and converting FOG to biodiesel that can meet ASTM specifications. GTW is a dirty and low-value waste from the food service industry that is high in FOG and currently is treated as a liability. The EFR-LLC process uses a bubble column react ...

Military Environmental Control Units (ECUs) represent one of the dominant energy users in forward operating environments, and significant effort is being made to improving overall ECU efficiency [1]. Reducing overall Size, Weight and Power (SWaP) of military ECUs is complicated by the transient, yet predictable, nature of the thermal demand profile over the course of a typical daily usage cycle, ...

Photovoltaics (solar cells) are an attractive technology to provide renewable energy sources for forward operating bases, man-portable power sources, and tactical applications. Solar arrays can provide base power greatly reducing the need for logistical fuels, continuous battery recharging for warfighters on the move, and integrated power sources for remote, autonomous systems, e.g. UAVs. To be ef ...

This topic addresses the problem of robustly commanding and controlling unmanned ground vehicles operating in complex, unstructured environments. Current approaches to this task rely on dense scene reconstruction from a variety of sensor data such as LIDAR and video imagery. Scene representations are then relayed to a remote human operator who provides commands at varying levels of supervisory con ...

Recent advancements in sensor simulation tools [2] have improved our ability to model radar, lidar, camera, and GPS with software/hardware in the loop. Of course, our ability to model the physics of heavy trucks [3] is quite mature as well. To address the challenge of developing the STE, we will provide our autonomy algorithms as Government Furnished Equipment (GFE). The focus of this topic ...