Award Data

This program addresses a new approach to IR imager that closely mimics biological organisms sense principals, having advantages in sensitivity, energy efficiency, reliability, and cost as compared with the competitive approaches. The innovation is based onincorporation of sensitive polymer-molecular with a highly efficient micro-machined thermal-mechanical PFA that directly converts IR image into ...

The Large N ASW problem can be summarized as pervasive short-range sensors with limited communication capabilities. The driving questions are how are false alarms controlled-not necessarily from an individual sensor node, but from the overallfield-performance of individual sensor nodes, the amount of information and frequency of communication. From its inception, distributed detection has produc ...

The effects of poor usability range from mere inconvenience to disaster. Human factors specialists employ usability analysis to reduce the likelihood or impact of such failures. However, good usability analysis requires usability reports that are rarelycollected, rarely complete, and difficult to analyze.Aptima and the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (U. Mass. Amherst) have partnered ...

Conventional Hall thrusters are difficult to scale to very small sizes. The proposed concept is a new type of compact plasma accelerator that addresses these scaling issues. It resembles a Hall thruster, taking advantage of the heritage of this proventechnology, but the current is driven inductively. It has the advantage of needing no cathode. While inductive coupling has been successfully dem ...

Interpretation of video imagery is the quintessential goal of computer vision. The ability to group moving pixels into regions and then associate semantic labels with those regions has long been studied by the vision community. Only recently have thecomponent technologies matured sufficiently to make this goal attainable for well-defined scenarios. We propose a system for semantic interpretation o ...

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) play an increasingly important role in many military scenarios. For the Navy to incorporate these vehicles into its critical missions, there has to be an efficient protocol to handle them on the decks of aircraft carriers.Current handling approaches and procedures have substantial limitations. For example, GPS-based taxiing via pre-set coordinates assumes that the a ...

Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) algorithms must be able to identify the conditions under which they are operating and tune their parameters accordingly to ensure robust accuracy and low false-alarm rate. For example, the signature of a target imagedunder ideal weather conditions (overcast skies) is fundamentally different from the signature of a target imaged when raining. Therefore, a single A ...

The proposed program aims to demonstrate nanoengineered metal surfaces which will reproducibly enhance the Raman scattering of chemical and biological agents while still providing selective detection at trace concentrations. With proven success infielding SERS systems and published results in nanomaterials engineering, EIC Laboratories, Inc. and Clemson University are uniquely poised to collabora ...

Low-power Hall thrusters offer potentially important advantages for certain military applications but issues of lifetime and efficiency degradation at lower powers are issues hindering its utilization. A factor impacting efficiency is that thestate-of-the-art techniques for electron generation used for neutralization (such as hollow cathodes operating on the same propellant as the thruster) do no ...

The objective of this Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) project is to develop three-dimensionally integrated packages for mixed DC/RF and optical inputs using micromachining techniques. There are many optoelectronic device designs that have showngreat promise in the research laboratory, but have demonstrated degraded response once packaged. The proposed effort will develop advanced packagi ...