Award Data

Railroad grade crossings remain one of the primary locations for fatal or near-fatal accidents involving rail vehicles. Multiple attempts to prevent such accidents by means such as signals and gates are severely hampered both by expense of installation and by the fact that many accidents are caused by vehicle drivers or pedestrians deliberately or through inattention ignoring or evading warnings ...

City planners and engineers need detailed assessments of public rights-of-way to evaluate existing conditions, determine compliance with draft accessibility guidelines, and plan reconstruction projects. Current assessment methods are inadequate and inefficient due to the time and resources required. This project will develop an automated public rights-of-way assessment process and the measuremen ...

Railroad yards are in constant movement with potentially thousands of train cars moving over miles of track compressed into a limited area. The harsh environment presents many safety hazards for railroad workers who must move through this environment and perform assigned tasks. Job related injuries cost he railroads over $1 billion annually and from 2008 30.3% of those injuries occurred in the r ...

With infrastructure costs escalating it is becoming essential to monitor the health of asphalt and concrete pavement so that timely maintenance can maximize their usefulness. This SBIR will develop a sensor that can be embedded within concrete or asphalt, which can measure moisture, temperature, stress and strain. It will provide critical data for evaluating pavement performance starting with th ...

Rail vehicle distance traveled measurements don't currently meet the precision requirement of 5ft./mile. An innovative microwave technique is proposed using two X band transceiver assemblies separated by a known distance. Reflected energy from metal objects such as tie-plates or dielectric contrast between ties and rail bed are used as replicate pairs to measure the time passage between transcei ...