Award Data

In this proposal we describe a technical approach to detect never-before-seen chemicals with existing chemical detection equipment. First, we will generate never-before-seen, synthetically viable, toxic chemicals. To do this we will use open-source software that enables synthetically viable chemicals to be generated as SMILES strings from a seed chemical, e.g., VX, RDX, etc. For each novel chemica ...

"Rising sea levels and king tide flooding in coastal areas across America are saturating onsite wastewater disposal systems (OSDS), resulting in the degradation of coastal ecosystems and 200,000+ illnesses annually. Many States are mandating system upgrades, with 88,000 upgrades required by 2050 in Hawaii alone. Unfortunately, existing upgrade options are unaffordable for 97% of Hawaiian homeowner ...

Oceanit proposes the design, construction, and testing of a hyperspectral imaging equipped Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) for the detection of various coral species and the monitoring of coral health. This system will be the prototype for the sensor part of a robust, COTS-based UAS system to aid the NOAA National Coral Reef Monitoring Program. Different coral families and species will be identified ...

Modern lithium ion batteries are known for their poor safety performance, with many reports of battery failure and fire having been reported. One of the major causes of battery fire is from the use of flammable solvents, such as organic carbonates, as the electrolyte. These hazards have long limited the usage of batteries in dangerous conditions, such as on the battlefield. To combat this issue, t ...

The project objective is to greatly reduce the cost of monitoring soil water content in highly-resolved vertical profile to promote increased adoption of more efficient water management tools. Cost is the most significant barrier to adoption of sophisticated data-driven irrigation management in permanent agriculture. Highly-resolved vertical soil water profiles are needed to learn soil-specific hy ...

This research aims to develop decision support tools for better maintenance and planning of renewable energy generation and storage assets using atmospheric, local weather, and on-ground environmental data blended with site-, regional- and national-generation data. The study will use a combination of these data to understand the relationship between non-cloud cover based atmospheric conditions and ...

Electronic monitoring (EM) represents a promising opportunity for fishery management of the future. Yet after nearly two decades of implementation less than 1% of the world’s fishing fleet are able to participate in these programs. Cost remains a key barrier to the implementation of these programs and the primary cost drivers are manual video review, data transmission and data storage. Our SBIR ...

U.S. Coast Guard personnel monitoring radio transmissions of vessels at sea must be able to identify distress calls despite interference, degraded conditions, and the stressed speech of those in emergency situations. However, not all distress calls are genuine. Hoax calls can be intended as malicious pranks, due to intoxication, or to distract Coast Guard assets from other tasks such as drug inter ...

Computing systems contain increasing and changing software applications from a wide variety of vendors and sources. These applications contain numerous libraries for them to function, which are often not known to the end-user and considered a black box. When these libraries or their dependencies are discovered to have a vulnerability, the end-user relies exclusively on the software publisher to re ...

We propose to use Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) measurements as an early warning system, to cue on-site validation of the soiling station and any available meteorological (MET) station data to validate if a work order to clean deposited particulate matter is necessary. This would move from reactive maintenance – often weeks delayed, to proactive maintenance – getting ahead of the weather impact ...