Award Data

It is not likely that an autonomous system can be programmed with all the information it requires to perform every mission or every variation of every contingency within the near future. One way to address this issue is to provide user-friendly means to teach or program a robot to add to its autonomous capability. This proposal focuses on the physical aspects of the robot performance, manipulat ...

Recent advancements in sensor simulation tools [2] have improved our ability to model radar, lidar, camera, and GPS with software/hardware in the loop. Of course, our ability to model the physics of heavy trucks [3] is quite mature as well. To address the challenge of developing the STE, we will provide our autonomy algorithms as Government Furnished Equipment (GFE). The focus of this topic ...

Maine Fresh Sea Farms (MFSF) will build a multi-species, multi-season prototype farm with the goal of having crops of fresh sea vegetables available throughout the year. What isn’t utilized fresh will be dried for longer-term storage and used in other products. Our team will gather data on water quality, nutrients, light levels, and hydrodynamics to assemble profiles of key parameters that deter ...

There are currently no inexpensive, expendable air-deployed monitoring systems (Dropsondes) that measure atmospheric data and oceanographic as a function of depth. These are important data in predicting the intensity and path of hurricanes. Boston Engineering proposes to provide NOAA with a solution to this challenge with the Multi-Purpose Above Surface/Below Surface Expendable Dropsonde (MASED) p ...

As analysts and operators move from data to insights, tools are needed for supervisory control, command and control, and intelligence analysis. Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) requires the ability to navigate and interpret mounds of data to produce actionable decisions. Through the Urban Telepresence program, the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) is redefining a concept of ...

A critical step in the extraction of elements from ore, especially rare earth elements that are found in complex minerals, is separation. Froth flotation is a highly versatile method for physically separating particles based on differences in the ability of air bubbles to selectively adhere to specific mineral surfaces in a mineral/water slurry. The particles with attached air bubbles are then ca ...

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are primary drivers of global climate change. Hence there is a crucial need to quantify their sources and sinks. A powerful method to constrain source and sink strengths is the analysis of the relative proportions of isotopic variants of GHG’s in atmospheric samples like those collected globally by NOAA’s Cooperative Air Sampling Network. Measurements that are ca ...