Award Data

"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 long endurance “StratoSonde” lighter-than-air, uncrewed system combines a low-cost, 5day endurance StratoSonde supports up to 10 micro-dropsondes, which when released from the HAB, descend safely through the entire atmospheric column under a ribbon drogue while reporting observations directly back to the HAB. This project will assess the feasibility of integrating a disposable miniature ae ...

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 ...

There is a clear need to improve weather forecasting accuracy. The greatest contributions to forecast uncertainty is a lack of meteorological observations over remote areas and areas experiencing pronounced convective activity. StratoSolutions’ new high-altitude balloon (HAB) platform with mini-dropsonde is a disruptive new uncrewed meteorological observation data source able to collect data at ...

Monitoring modern-day fisheries is extremely challenging. Every day, millions of vessels harvest the oceans, and many remain unregulated, putting target and non-target fish populations at risk of overexploitation and collapse. To combat this, fisheries managers are increasingly turning to Electronic Monitoring (EM) technologies – integrated systems of cameras and sensors – to record onboard ac ...

To enhance U.S. Navy operations, a technology platform will be developed for fabricating environmentally robust, visible through near-infrared (NIR) band transparent, tapered resistivity films. After refining the operational requirements and updating the device design models, a design trade study will be performed using the measured electrical (i.e., conductivity) and optical (i.e., spectral trans ...