List

To reach the end user, oil and gas production at the wellhead must be transmitted through the country and distributed to a wide range of customers. This logistical system requires natural gas gathering lines, processing facilities, product storage tanks and lots of other equipment. What results is air pollution caused by industry losses during these operations and the use of continuous or intermit ...

Swarm robotics is one of the key enabling technologies for significantly extending mankind's reach beyond the Earth's surface. However, when bringing theory to practice, challenging problems related to the coordination and control of these swarms quickly arise. Vecna Robotics proposes a collaboration with MIT to extend existing autonomy behaviors and test platforms to address a class of pl ...

This project develops an ultra-thin and formable prepreg material from reusable short carbon fiber composites (CFC), including process and material development, test panel fabrication and mechanical performance evaluation. Key to superior performance of ultra-thin ply materials is the ability to fabricate high fiber volume and uniform fiber distribution prepreg with low void content and layer thic ...

NASA has been investigating morphing aircraft for multi-mission capabilities and performance improvements in existing fixed-wing aircraft. In addition, the design of aeroelastic aircraft that can control the structural flexibility to their advantage, is an open area of research and development. In spite of the plethora of work on morphing aircraft and long slender wings, the goal of fielding such ...

Trajectory-based operations (TBO) offer a major change in air traffic management with the potential for substantial performance and safety benefits. Considering the scope of the changes, TBO concepts must pass stringent hurdles for demonstrating technical feasibility, operational benefits, and safety. A successful TBO concept should provide benefits in the near term by using existing airline and F ...

As robotics and autonomous systems continue to rapidly evolve into highly advanced, multi-mission systems capable of manned-unmanned teaming efforts, opportunities to leverage practical real-world autonomous intervehicle coordination becomes feasible. Disaster relief efforts such as search and rescue are poised to take advantage of collaborating unmanned assets to provide risk reduction and necess ...

Robust Analytics proposes a suite of near-term technologies that can support managing multiple autonomous or semi-autonomous aircraft including Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) and Urban Air Mobility (UAM) vehicles simultaneously. Our approach builds off the existing knowledge base of airline operations, leveraging emerging technologies that enable autonomous flight.Our approach enables monitoring of ...

The design of new aircraft involves understanding the flow physics around the configurations as well as their stability and control characteristics over the entire flight envelope. Such a coverage is extremely expensive if wind tunnel and flight tests are the primary means of understanding the aerodynamic characteristics. Hence, there has been a push towards use of simulations for understanding ae ...

There is substantial evidence suggesting that a Lithium-ion cell undergoes internal structural and mechanical changes prior to a catastrophic failure. Some of these changes include electrode expansion, electrode ruffling, dendrite formation, internal gas formation, and internal density changes. A key characteristic of these changes is that most of them occur prior to any external measurable parame ...

This project is to study the feasibility of developing an in-situ, compact, low-power, non-destructive  X-ray imaging instrument to investigate the ice/rock critical properties, such as density, porosity, crack, and chemical non–uniformity, liquid distribution and flowing path, etc..This proposed system will be built with compact low-power X-ray components and an innovative system ...