Award Data

The Department of Defense (DOD) accounts for over 21 million barrels of oil usage per day, with a majority of the fuel being appropriated to JP-8. Among the military"s various armed forces, the Army alone spends over $4.1 billion for energy, with a major portion of this also attributed to JP-8 jet fuel consumption for maintaining operational capability on a daily basis. Diesel generators are curre ...

The objective of this research is to develop materials that replace the current generation of visible smoke formulations used by the U.S. military. In particular the materials must produce low or no flame so that they don't present a fire hazard, have relatively low toxicity, and are efficient. The efficiency is defined in a figure of merit that combines fill factor, yield factor, extinctio ...

Barron Associates, Inc.~proposes to develop the Rugged Automated Training (RAT) system, a cost-effective, rugged, automated environment to train and deploy small animals to detect landmines and other compounds of interest, and to evaluate their performance. The RAT system will train animals to recognize odorants using standard Pavlovian conditioning procedures in specialized, automated operant ch ...

Sensor development researchers and engineers have perpetually sought novel methods to reduce sensor size and improve performance. Continued miniaturization of sensors through micromachining has enabled novel applications and introduced new paradigms for engineered systems to interact with the world. The challenge has always been to improve performance while continually reducing size. In the curren ...

A technique that enables new methods of obscurant modeling with faster rendering while maintaining or improving physical fidelity is proposed. The proposed technique not only exhibits the statistics of voxel based obscurants, but matches real-world data as well. The main objective from Phase II efforts will be a further refinement of the flow field and particle technique of generating physically c ...

The enormous effort devoted to the data acquisition, signal processing, and automatic recognition of stationary targets has resulted in a generation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems that are meeting the challenge of real-world conditions. However, in a practical battlefield, moving targets may pose a more severe threat than stationary targets. Many high value targets are only vulnerable w ...

Beginning from an advanced stage of development, this Phase II STTR project will produce designs and prototypes for a ricin-specific artificial antibody constructed using DNA origami. These novel constructs will provide both a capture function (mimicking the properties of an antibody) and intrinsic optical reporting functionality, which marks a significant improvement over current antibody capabil ...

FPGAs are widely used in nearly every DoD electronics system because of their processing capabilities, low NRE costs, field programmability, and time to market advantages over ASICs. However, FPGAs"greatest strength reconfigurability is also the source of their low performance and high power consumption limiting functionality and battery life of mobile applications. GoofyFoot Labs has developed ...

This project will develop an integrated nanoplasmonic sensor Raman device to detect chemical warfare agents. The Raman device will be designed and produced by MKS Technology and will be cell-phone sized for portability. The device will: operate from 2-AA batteries; have a touch screen user-interface; will have Bluetooth connectivity, and will be ruggedized to MIL-STD-810G. The reader will have ...

In Phase I we designed and evaluated a thermal stereo prototype; however, rather than focusing on a nighttime-only deliverable in Phase II, we propose to combine our Phase I experience with stereo thermal sensing and our decades long experience with traditional outdoor stereo sensing to deliver a 24-hour, passive-sensing payload. We call this self-contained system PROWL (Perception for Robot ...