Award Data

This Small Business Innovative Research Phase I project will develop and demonstrate a passivation process that will result in a pin-hole free protective coating for nickel-gold (Ni/Au) plated copper micro-channel coolers (MCC) used for laser diode thermal management. This proposed approach will use atomic layer deposition (ALD) to deposit highly uniform ceramic thin films on commercially availab ...

Despite excellent recent progress in path planning, current state-of-the-art planners are still incapable of operating robustly in environments that are both cluttered and highly dynamic. The challenge is two-fold. First, predicting the trajectories of dynamic obstacles (i.e., cars, humans, aircraft) is very noisy. As a result, to achieve robust execution, perception modules need to provide a rich ...

The proposed solid-state (non-magnetic) DC-DC converter technology offers the military a completely different approach to converters for ballistics weapon systems that has important advantages over conventional power conditioning for projectile weapons systems. We are proposing to translate this new technology all the way through to demonstrated fuze hardware that includes addressing both risk re ...

CPU technology has progressed to a point of diminishing marginal returns in its current direction. The great success of the highly pipelined sequential processor has now become a hindrance to the efficient scalability for the evolutionary escape route of cookie-cutter chip multi-processor (CMP) designs. RISC instruction sets exist because they are easy to decode and pipeline, but they have relativ ...

Several concerns currently inflate the time and cost of integrating heterogeneous data resources and impose a barrier to superior knowledge of the urban battlespace: global data standards cannot be imposed across all enterprises’ schemas, specialized expertise is required to map new data sources into existing ontologies, and some data resources are not intranet accessible by default. In this P ...

This project describes research that will lead to the commercialization of the Tool Dashboard, a new technique for pre-process milling parameter selection. In this approach, dynamic models of the cutting tool and holder will be analytically coupled to spindle-machine measurements to predict the tool point dynamics. Given this information, stability lobe diagrams, which display stable and unstable ...

Existing machine tool metrology methods measure the quasistatic errors of a machine tool and, thus, evaluate its static positioning accuracy. Yet machine tools are dynamic, they do not stop and pause in an effort to reach a programmed position. Additionally, current techniques do not identify all of the errors, many of which significantly impact the volumetric accuracy of the machine. Almost immed ...

Mezzo fabricates high performance micro tube heat exchangers. In this proposal, extremely light weight versions of these heat exchangers made from polymers will be examined for use on high altitude unmanned air vehicles (UAVs). The anticipated weight of these heat exchangers is expected to be less than 25% that of a conventional (i.e. plate-fin) heat exchanger.

In modern battlespace, deployment of chemical and biological agents by our adversaries is a threat that needs to be addressed. These agents are cheap to manufacture and easily available. Their effects can be devastating to our troops. Detecting chemical and biological agents often require bulky equipment in a laboratory. Identifying the agents could take many minutes in such facilities. A more eff ...

We propose a unique system for massively distributed social problem-solving that will enable large groups of individuals to form solutions to complex, multi-factor problems. Our minimalist framework, called the ePluribus Solver, will leverage the viral nature of communication in existing social networks to engage individuals in the problem solving process and allow them to develop their own emerge ...