Award Data

Information overload and cluttered user interfaces cause decreased situational awareness and lowered performance of the human operators. Irrelevant data increases searching times for tasks requiring the identification of threats, causing delayed decisions. Cognitive burden on the user increases as displays become more cluttered, which results in increased operator stress leading to slower decisi ...

Improved understanding of mechanisms controlling bone conduction (BC) sound transmission, especially with respect to acoustic excitation, is urgently needed in order to develop more effective hearing protection in extremely high noise fields. The Phase I research program made great progress toward this goal by yielding new insights into a mechanism believed to be a significant contributor to BC s ...

The Air Force is in need of a system to measure stray laser energy during the open-air test-range firing of high-energy laser weapons such as the Airborne Laser. In Phase I, a laboratory-scale system composed of four hemispherical-imaging laser-scattering detectors was constructed to monitor light scattered from stray laser energy during simulated laser weapon engagements. It was demonstrated th ...

The machining of structures from materials such as titanium is typically accomplished using end mills and roughing 90 to 95 percent of the material to leave precise, complex features on thin-walled structures. High-speed machining is widely used in the manufacture of parts and reduces labor significantly. Single Cell Machining will be developed to produce structures that require machining and lo ...

The objective of this effort is to develop a remote acoustics-based system to detect rotating equipment health status. The goal is an automated acoustic monitoring system that includes the necessary filtering/data manipulation techniques and expert system/classification/anomaly detection algorithms to diagnose the health of plant equipment (compressors, electric motors, gear trains, fans, etc) in ...

AVID proposes a smart material-enabled hovering ducted-fan micro air vehicle (MAV) to greatly enhance the bomb damage information (BDI) capabilities of the U.S. Air Force. Such a design offers a more intuitive search capability for the BDI mission. Unlike fixed-wing MAVs, a ducted-fan MAV would stop, hover, and investigate an area, rotating to pan the sensor right and left, zooming in and out: ...

A prototype Rapid Mission Planning and Operations software tool is being developed in the Phase I ef-fort. It is proposed here to continue this effort, greatly maturing the software tool and establishing its benefits in a real-world, high-fidelity mission planning demonstration. We refer to this software tool as the Mission Planner. It will take advantage of technologies developed under the Air ...

The objective of this STTR Phase II proposal is to build a versatile, near-surface light weight multifunctional metallic structure that can be used for magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) control and power generation. In order to achieve these goals, a controlled plasma must be generated in air with high efficiency, the air must pass through a strong magnetic field, and current must be able to flow through ...

Acquiring probabilistic knowledge for the development of fusion models can prove to be a difficult task. In many applications, the lack of availability of historical data forces the modelers to rely extensively on expert judgment techniques which traditionally requires a large amount of manpower and is exceedingly time-consuming. Under Phase I of this effort, the DAC Team has proven the feasibilit ...

The project aims to further develop the AeroLensCraft for high-altitude air platform, and to engage in hardware validation of key innovations and enabling technologies : the unique shape, with TVM, and the unique energy harvesting, storage and recovery system combined with the buoyancy system.