Award Data

The Foster-Miller team is developing a novel coverglass system that protects photovoltaic cells on space power systems that are exposed to high doses of ionizing radiation. The spectrum of radiation a solar cell is exposed to not only provides usable energy, over time it also reduces the efficiency of the cell by darkening the barrier coverglass, escalates the operating temperature, and deteriora ...

We propose to develop Legged Robot Mule, a new kind of robot that helps dismounted soldiers by carrying part of their load. Legged Robot Mule will travel on operationally relevant terrain, such as narrow mountain trails and densely wooded jungles. It will use dynamic balance to support its payload while maintaining a narrow base, enhancing its mobility. It will use computer vision to follow a hum ...

The Air Force has an interest in new designs and new materials for TPS of hypersonic reentry vehicles. Military hypersonic vehicles will reenter the atmosphere according to trajectories that are more aggressive than that of the Space Shuttle Orbiter and expected to be able to maneuver in the atmosphere at speeds around March 20 for more than 4100 seconds. This will result in the extremely high t ...

Chiliad's Phase II effort will further enhance, extend, integrate, and demonstrate in a pilot its distributed collaborative analysis suite. This software currently provides enterprise-wide data fusion; contextual search; full text analysis; on-the-fly concept recognition; automatic metadata generation and extraction; dynamic knowledge navigation and discovery; real-time monitoring, filtering and r ...

Polycrystalline aluminum oxynitride, ALON Optical Ceramic, has long been identified as the premier transparent armor material. However, until recently it was very expensive and available only in small pieces, and small quantities. ALON windows and domes are now available, through Surmet Corporation, in larger sizes and at lower costs than ever before. However, considerable additional cost reductio ...

TIA Research will continue the development of an approach for supporting the efficient storage, dissemination and retrieval of Ground Moving Target Indicator and Synthetic Aperture RADAR imagery within a distributed database. We will achieve this by implementing the results obtained during the Phase I efforts that addressed the key elements of the problem: (1) the design of data structures for sup ...

In this project, a new TOA/TDOA UWB RAC location system will be developed and applied to precision guidance and navigation of autonomous mine-detection mobile robots. The system will be capable of pinpointing geographical position of an object with accuracies from a few centimeters to a few meters over an area of several to hundred square kilometers at a position update rate of over 200 updates pe ...

Information fusion is critical to the effective analysis of battlefield intelligence, but because it remains mostly un-automated it places high demands on the limited resource of skilled human analysts. We propose a principled approach to information fusion in the context of Situation Development that is grounded in formal models and methods. Situation development involves fusing information fro ...

Future Army missions at the Unit of Action will rely on the ability of human and computers to fuse disparate data sources to support complex Intelligence Analysis tasks. To support the development of such systems, we propose to design, evaluate, and Build Interfaces For Operator-in-the-Loop Data Fusion (BIFOLD). Under Phase I, we demonstrated the feasibility of our approach. Specifically, we p ...

The primary issue faced by ATR systems center around the large "variability of the ATR problem space spanned by the targets, sensors, and the environment and the associated challenge is to develop "robust" approaches to improve ATR system performance. The primary innovation of this work is the development of an automated way of developing heuristic inference rules that can draw on multiple models ...