Award Data

Static organization charts and standard processes define roles, methods, and authority in useful ways for common missions. But these same, rigid structures force the organization to behave inefficiently, often ineffectively on problems in new domains, problems requiring new coordination methods and ad hoc teams. What is needed to facilitate rapid formation of effective human networks is a system ...

A key challenge for battlefield simulation is the estimation of enemy courses of action (COAs). Current adversarial COA development is a manual time-consuming process prone to errors due to limited knowledge about the adversary and its ability to adapt. Development of decision aids that can predict adversary’s intent and range of possible behaviors, as well as automation of such technologies wit ...

We propose to develop and deploy a fully featured groupware platform for Rapid Expertise Aggregation Supporting Optimal Negotiation (REASON). REASON supports collaborative decision-making in dynamic, time critical situations. It presents a decision as a graph to improve coordination and reduce the amount of necessary communication within a team. Evidence is aggregated to identify the best decision ...

The evolution of network-centric environments increasingly provides access to more data and collaborators relevant to decision making. Unfortunately, it also means the decision-maker increasingly needs to efficiently and effectively utilize that data in order to stay competitive. In network-centric warfare the consequences of less than optimal performance can be extremely serious. With the deploym ...

Fully autonomous, taskable robots for use in unconstrained environments are still a dream rather than a reality because of a host of problems, including capabilities of existing sensors, effectors, and control/planning software. Indeed, concepts of operations for robot use require that robots collaborate directly with humans, in relationships similar to bomb squad dogs. Fortunately, enough progres ...

One approach to locating illicit bomb factories in Iraq and Afghanistan is analytical monitoring within the ventilation systems of suspect residential buildings. We are proposing a multiple sensor analyzer that sequentially interrogates individual vents or ducts in such buildings and produces fingerprints characteristic of present target substances. The basic premise of this proposal is to loc ...

Our aim is to develop a nanofluidic-based sensor and instrument platform which will provide direct detection and quantification of analytes approaching molecular concentrations. We anticipate that the method will enable rapid detection and identification of presence or exposure to chemical and bioterror agents in air, water, contaminated surfaces, forensic samples, food and body fluids, as well ex ...

We shall investigate, implement and demonstrate MAVIS, a 3D vision system incorporating robust Real-Time SFM for SMAV application scenarios. Automatic pose determination and extraction of 3D structure of the environment are critical to autonomous navigation and obstacle avoidance of SMAVs in constrained and crowded environments. Extracting such state information under various constraints (low qual ...

A Phase I effort to investigate the use of poly-crystalline Ge-on-Si and strained SiGe alloy grown on silicon for near-infrared photodetectors is proposed. These devices are expected to cover the spectral band that stretches from a wavelength of 0.8 to 1.6 microns. If reasonable performance devices can be fabricated, this will potentially pave the way for the integration of signal processing e ...

The Tactical Teams project goal is to demonstrate the feasibility of a framework and relevant technologies to support multiple humans and robots in the collaborative performance of specialized tactical maneuvers. The ultimate objective of this project is warfighter support - enabling humans and robots to seamlessly cooperate in the execution of joint tactical maneuvers. In order to accomplish th ...