Award Data

The overall goal of this proposed program (through Phase III) is to develop a chip-scale assay that can detect, identify, and quantify the presence of Category A (or B) bioagents in water at the required sensitivity (e.g. 8000 B. anthracis spores or 50µg of ricin per liter water) within 10 minutes. During the Phase I program feasibility was demonstrated by successfully detecting the capture of l ...

The capability of separating and localizing intermixed sounds in an auditory scene, also known as auditory scene analysis is the ear"s ability to handle the cocktail party effect. There are no useful models that emulate this holy grail of auditory research. Fourier-type theory and computational auditory scene analysis (CASA) techniques do not fully explain how the biological ear is able to"hear ev ...

In the current SBIR program, AlphaSense aimed at developing a novel, handheld, non-destructive sensor to evaluate the integrity of Naval Advanced Amorphous Coatings (NAAC) in real time. In phase I, we have proven the feasibility of using the cavity perturbation technique to detect different types of defects present in thermal-sprayed testing coupons. Specifically, we optimized the sensor probe des ...

In Phase I, we developed a new system for pedestrian detection, tracking and counting. In this system, both IR LED stereo camera and laser scanner were selected for use. We have demonstrated that our pedestrian counting system can count multiple pedestrians walking in a large group, maintain individual tracks even when some pedestrians walk in unpredictable patterns or leave the crosswalk prematur ...

Building upon the successes of an SBIR Phase I project, Traffax Inc. in cooperation with Purdue University proposes in Phase II a large scale deployment of Bluetooth Traffic Monitoring (BTM) technology to exercise real-time capability and continued exploration of BTM arterial specific applications. Whereas the first phase concentrated on resolving several key issues and demonstrating utility in s ...

Superhydrophobic nanostructured coating will be developed from transparent ultrastrong materials. The coatings will be scalable, inexpensive, mechanically robust and thermally resilient. We will initially design such coatings using layered nanocomposites. Then it will be optimized for different surfaces. In the final stages of the project we will demonstrated scaled up version of the coatings lead ...

In the defense industry today, high level SysML system models are used by engineers beginning early in the design process to functionally decompose the system being designed and to flow down requirements to sub-systems and components. Despite their usefulness, these system models are by and large descriptive models and not analytical (executable) models. In contrast, domain level engineers (struct ...

The Electromagnetic Plasmoid Thruster (EMPT) has demonstrated the ability to ionize, electromagnetically accelerate, and eject a broad range of complex and chemically-reactive molecular gases, including monopropellants. EMPT has the potential to dramatically increase the operational range of existing electric propulsion (EP) systems in both power density, power throttling, and propellant choice. P ...

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) functions as virtual tutors that adapt to student responses. Such ITSs, however, do not yield student learning improvements equivalent to students tutored by human instructors. Ascertaining Un-Reported Affect (AURA) is a closed-loop, platform-independent"front-end"for informing ITSs with near real-time inferences of student engagement and affect during learning ...

Operations centers for tactical military activities, incident response, and other domains all involve multiple teams of individuals interacting with people and systems within and outside of their organization to enable continuous mission success. In these organizations, effective coordination and collaboration is critical. To improve collaboration, an end-to-end sensor and analysis technology is n ...