Award Data

The purpose of this Phase-II project is to build upon the promising results achieved during Phase-I, where it was shown that ceramic coatings raised the breakdown voltage and reduced the amount of damage and improved the recovery after a breakdown event for plastic insulators. The main goals of the Phase-II are to (1) coat actual insulators for the Shiva and HPM devices for testing, (2) to optimiz ...

We propose to develop a superior 3D surface reconstruction algorithm that operates on monocular aerial video. High quality pose estimates from inertial data will be used to construct dense depth maps of the 3D environment. Each 3D pixel in the reconstruction will be extracted from multiple views in the redundant video stream to minimize the error in the reconstruction. We will refine and adapt the ...

The current situation in Iraq is making it extremely clear that the urban environment is a chaotic and dangerous battle space. Currently available technology cannot provide the level of real-time situational awareness needed by each individual soldier. DARPA has determined that Sparse Conformal Acoustic Network (SCAN) technology, or soldier-worn acoustic-array “vests,” is a potential solution ...

Composite avionics enclosures with liquid-cooled card guides are predicted to weigh less than current state-of-the-art aluminum enclosure. While there are many successes in developing composite-based Thermal Planes for advanced avionics applications, limited effort has been spent on the enclosure and significantly less on the card guide. The objective of this program is to design, fabricate and qu ...

Tools from the proposed program will help the Government maintain the upper hand in the “arms race” between software protection and software attack (reverse engineering). Escalating in the commercial sector, this digital war now threatens national assets. The innovative products help achieve two goals: 1. Perform the most demanding tests conceivable on next-generation software protection tec ...

Terrorism is one of the greatest threats facing military and civilian personnel today. US military forces are increasingly exposed to deadly shoulder fired rocket attacks and improvised explosive devices in Iraq and other hostile environments. Such trends raise a significant security threat for terrorist attacks within the United States. In order to deter terrorist activities, US military warfight ...

High-resolution lidar imaging provides fully three-dimensional (3D) images that have distinct advantages in comparison to two-dimensional images. Some of the advantages provided by the additional range information are the ability to reject clutter, to accurately discriminate decoys from targets, and to provide an additional dimension for detection and classification. Areté Associates, in conjunc ...

The complexity of simulating electro-magnetic propagation through turbulence often requires sophisticated techniques both in the use of proper physics models and in the numerical implementation in simulations. Incoherent imaging of extended targets is one problem which is not reasonably solved with standard techniques. At some levels this problem is completely intractable. An approach is develo ...

This proposed Phase II effort continues to bridge the gap between the present state of development of MEMS deformable mirror technology and the practical implementation of this technology in high resolution, wide dynamic range applications. The high performance, low cost, and small size of these devices will be of significant value and serve as an enabling technology for a wide range of applicati ...

In Phase II of this project we will capitalize on the successful incorporation of carbon nanotubes into carbon fabrics, by optimizing the process and scaling the technique for the manufacture of large 3-D composites that will be of use to the aerospace industry and the Air Force. In Phase I we successfully demonstrated the feasibility of incorporation of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) into carbon fibers ...