Award Data

One of the causes of derailments occurs when the track gage is no longer compliant with the FRA track safety standards for gage measurments. Ensuring track gage is in compliance with the FRA track safety standards is therefore of paramount importance to the FRA. Currently, the FRA wishes to develop a non-contact track gage measurement system that overcomes the limitations of current systems (unr ...

The public awareness of recent auto fatalities has brought to the forefront the danger associated with tread separation tire failures. Current tires and vehicles do not have a means of warning the operator of imminent tire failure. If a system were implemented to provide such a warning to the operator, action could be taken to prevent a potentially disastrous accident. A design team led by Luna ...

This proposal seeks to produce a unique thermographic coating inspection system that is customized for the inspection of bridge coatings. This system uses active thermography where IR sources are used to provide controlled heating to a coating system. The presence of a defect in a coating system will result in differences in heat flow, which can be imaged with an infrared camera. An off-the-she ...

Planphoria will research, define and develp methods to turn our nation's roadways into a giant energy collection and transference system that produces low cost electrical energy close to point of use. Though roadway environmental conditions change, and different roadway requirements vastly differ from the requirements of other roadways, we will determine the feasibility of this concept by leading ...

A concept for a low cost, high quality night vision system for use by coxswains and crew members during night intercepts that is capable of providing the visual acuity, depth perception and situational awareness necessary for high-speed maneuvers is a described. It allows the operator to see the sea state at night, safely maneuver a high speed boat and pursue covert intercepts. The helmet-mounte ...

On this program, we will design, fabricate and test of a novel wide field-of-view night-vision system for use by coxswains and crewmembers during night intercepts. The system is capable of providing the visual acuity, depth perception and situational awareness necessary for high-speed boat maneuvers and allows the operator to see the sea at night, safely maneuver a high-speed boat and pursue cove ...

This project offers an innovative inertial navigation safety system for general aviation use. The device is intended to provide dead-reckoning navigation information during unexpected and extended duration GPS service outages. The navigation algorithm will rely on a nonlinear stochastic filtering method. The specific innovation is that a priori information regarding the aircraft state is used t ...

GPS receivers are heavily used in aviation for both visual and instrument flights. There is a need for a backup system so that enroute and non-precision approaches can be flown without reliance on ground based systems should GPS be unavailable. We propose to use barometric pressure, airspeed, low-cost inertial sensors, three-axis magnetometer along with high-fidelity geomagnetic models, and an ...