Award Data

UAVS (Unmanned Aircraft Vehicle System) integration with naval vessels is currently realized in limited form. This is largely due to the fact that the operational envelopes of these vehicles are based solely on at-sea flight testing. In addition to the complexities involved with at-sea flight testing, the unsteady nature of ship-airwakes and the use of automated UAV control software necessitates ...

Precision timekeeping is an essential enabling tool for all modern navigation, digital data transmission and telecommunications networks. In particular; rapid direct acquisition of the GPS Y-code in the presence of deliberate jamming is important for a wide variety of weapon systems. Legacy atomic clock solutions are too large and consume too much power to be routinely integrated into stressful ...

In this program, Busek Co. Inc and Stanford University will develop and demonstrate a multi-mode high power plasma gun that can be used for both space propulsion and as a counter-measure against space debris or potentially hostile spacecraft. Investigations of this Coaxial High Energy (CHENG) thruster in the 1980's showed that it can damage a target. Because it is efficient over a wide range of ...

We propose to design, develop, and evaluate a system for Acquiring representations of Meta-information to Enhance Battlespace Awareness (AMEBA). AMEBA aids the warfighter by providing representations of meta-information, or characteristics of information such as uncertainty, staleness, etc. that aid decision-making and are not typically provided. Under Phase I, we demonstrated the feasibility of ...

Physical Sciences Inc. (PSI) proposes to develop a self-contained, biodegradable, chemiluminescent hydrogel for applications in covert determination of trespass. The hydrogel will stabilize the generation of light by mimicking a solution-phase environment. PSI’s design is expected to yield a pressure-activated passive chemiluminescent signal that will persist at readable luminosities for about 2 ...

The ability to actively control the buoyancy of underwater sea gliders could greatly enhance the efficiency of the underwater vehicles. Both large displacements as well as small (trim) displacements are beneficial to finely control the buoyancy of the sea glider. For Phase I Mide proposed and showed that it is feasible to utilize either shape memory allow (SMA) dimples, or super elastic alloy (S ...

Physical Sciences Inc. proposes to develop a calorimeter designed specifically for accurately measuring the solar absorbance (alpha) to long wavelength infrared emittance (epsilon) ratio, alpha/epsilon, of spacecraft thermal control coatings that can actively and controllably change their alpha or epsilon in response to the thermal environment. Additionally, we propose approaches to determine abso ...

Active interrogation holds the most promise for detecting heavily shielded materials at a distance. This effort will use pulsed neutron excitation of fission reactions in the target being inspected in conjunction with an imaging detector. Special nuclear material (SNM) that is present will undergo fission reactions that generate prompt and delayed neutrons which will be emitted by the target. Th ...

ALTAIR Center in cooperation with University of Rochester proposes to develop a new class of active nanophotonic devices based on quantum dots embedded into photonic crystal microstructures fabricated in silicon-on-insulator waveguides. Due to extremely strong nonlinear optical and electro-optical properties and extremely short switching times, the silicon-based photonic crystal microstructures wi ...

Effective team training is at the heart of enhanced mission effectiveness for military operations now and into the foreseeable future. However, despite numerous advances in intelligent tutoring system (ITS) technologies for individual skills, these systems have yet to fully address the "coach-less" instruction of teamwork skills. Accordingly, in this project we propose to build a prototype Intel ...