Award Data

The Navy is developing a new type of UAS for small-deck ships that can operate from these platforms but that provide the endurance and range of a conventional fixed-wing UAS. These UASs are tail-sitting and take off and land vertically (VTOL) while flying horizontally. The Navy is seeking propulsion systems for these UASs that have high specific power, but also have reasonable efficiency (SFC). Th ...

Current VTOL UASs in development, and concepts being pursued by both commercial and military operators, require high-power delivery on takeoff and landing segments. This duty can be served with a special purpose ultra-lightweight gas turbine-alternator. For this short duty cycle, the relaxed SFC requirement opens opportunities for weight reduction strategies. This FOA’s specification for elect ...

The Navy utilizes small, crewed watercraft, e.g., the Special Operations Craft – Ravine, for a range of missions in the littoral zone. These watercrafts, while designed for high-speed operation, also require low-speed stealth operation to successfully complete all types of mission objectives. However, the existing internal combustions engines and propulsion systems currently used on these vessel ...

Air-launch weapon system store separation dynamics need to be fully characterized to ensure safety and weapon controllability during the separation phase. The current 6-DOF store separation used by the NAVAIR’s Store Separation Branch is NAVSEP. As a legacy FORTRAN-based tool, NAVSEP lacks commercial-grade software development, documentation, support, and upkeep, nor can it take full advantage o ...

The primary technical objective of the proposed effort will be to investigate integration of optical gain medium with thin-film lithium niobate on insulator (TFLNOI) optical waveguides. Recent developments in crystal ion-sliced (CIS) TFLNOI have enabled a new class of electro-optic modulators and photonic integrated circuits with tighter mode confinement, a compact footprint, ultra-high bandwidth, ...

While Electro Optic (EO) sensors stationed on the surface and space systems are key to the Deprtment of the Navy’s (DoN) ability to track and counter hypersonic threats, they face limitations. Both space based and surface level sensors are prone to signal blockage by clouds, which absorb optical and infrared signals characteristic to Hypersonic Glide Vehicles HGVs. Well over 50% of the ocean is ...

As the proliferation of video sensors continues, it becomes increasingly difficult to simultaneously monitor available video feeds to extract meaningful information. While automated analytics tools help, there is value to having a single, integrated view of a scene - a composite of the available cameras. These cameras may have different resolutions, framerates, and fields of view while operating i ...

Sea mines are a persistent threat to naval operations. Mines are inexpensive to fabricate and easy to deploy, making them a favorite tool of our adversaries. The Navy is actively developing new countermine technologies to defeat this threat more quickly and efficiently than ever before. However, countermining operations still require manual battle damage assessment (BDA) to verify target neutraliz ...

The goal of this SBIR is to develop a Heat Injury Prevention System (HIPS) kit that provides technologies for real-time monitoring to prevent exertional heat illness in a training environment, at scale, for active-duty service members – specifically for Marine Corps and Army personnel. The proposed work for Phase I would involve the development of a prototype HIPS kit that can be used to test, c ...

The amount of data being collected by sensors and cameras has allowed for an explosion in the use of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) to analyze and synthesize useful knowledge from streams of image data. These systems often act as black boxes to observers with little insight into how they function and little knowledge of how trustworthy their predictions and identification. Cu ...