Award Data

CHI Systems and the Institute for Human Machine Cognition have teamed to create a human-robot interaction system that leverages cognitive representations of shared context as a basis for a fundamentally new approach to human-robotic interaction. This approach centers on a framework for representing context, and for using context to enable robot adaptive decision-making and behavior. The framework ...

Recent advancements in sensor simulation tools [2] have improved our ability to model radar, lidar, camera, and GPS with software/hardware in the loop. Of course, our ability to model the physics of heavy trucks [3] is quite mature as well. To address the challenge of developing the STE, we will provide our autonomy algorithms as Government Furnished Equipment (GFE). The focus of this topic ...

Military Environmental Control Units (ECUs) represent one of the dominant energy users in forward operating environments, and significant effort is being made to improving overall ECU efficiency [1]. Reducing overall Size, Weight and Power (SWaP) of military ECUs is complicated by the transient, yet predictable, nature of the thermal demand profile over the course of a typical daily usage cycle, ...

This topic addresses the problem of robustly commanding and controlling unmanned ground vehicles operating in complex, unstructured environments. Current approaches to this task rely on dense scene reconstruction from a variety of sensor data such as LIDAR and video imagery. Scene representations are then relayed to a remote human operator who provides commands at varying levels of supervisory con ...

Video Demonstration of the Phase I Prototype: http://youtu.be/vS0XzzPl3iU Purpose: This project will develop and test Happy Atoms, a physical modeling set and an interactive iPad app for use in high school chemistry classrooms. Happy Atoms is designed to facilitate student learning of atomic modeling, a difficult topic for chemistry high school students to master. Standard instructional practice ...

National Aeronautical and Space Administration's (NASA) Aviation Safety Program "seeks capabilities furthering the practice of proactive safety management." One area of particular interest is the prognostication of Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of avionic systems. In response, Nokomis is proposing to develop an Electronic Health Monitoring (EHM) Sensor Unit which would be able provide accurate est ...

During a NASA Phase I SBIR program, ACT addressed the need for light-weight, non-venting PCM heat storage devices by successfully demonstrating proof-of-concept of a vapor chamber with a PCM-based wick structure. The principal objective of the Phase II program is to design, fabricate, and test a full-scale PCM vapor chamber. Goals of the Phase II program include establishing thermal and structural ...

In this SBIR Phase II program Advanced Cooling Technologies, Inc. (ACT) proposes to develop titanium/water heat pipes suitable for Spacecraft Fission Power applications. NASA is currently examining small fission power reactors design, such as the Kilopower, which aims to provide roughly 1 kW of electric power. Kilopower plans to use titanium/water heat pipes to remove the waste heat from the cold ...

ProtoInnovations, LLC (PI) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have formed a partnership to research, develop, and experimentally characterize a suite of robotic controls to significantly improve the safety, mean travel speed, and rough-terrain access of wheeled planetary rovers. In meeting this goal we have been developing algorithms for all-terrain adaptive locomotion which inclu ...

The Phase I program concluded with the successful demonstration of a piezo enhanced pointing system targeted to the CubeSat class of satellites. The Phase I program results also surpassed the Phase I goals allowing the proposed Phase II program to further push the capabilities and design of the approach. The main objective of the Phase II program is to further quantify the performance of the Att ...