Award Data

A tethered rapelling robot system, dubbed SPIDAR, will be built and tested, capable of use in collapsed urban environments for civil-defense and search-and-rescue and reconnaissance applications. The design is based on a modular and payload/marsupial-capable design optimized for use in environments considered for a variety of applications. The project will design, build and test a rugged prototype ...

Insuring the safety and control of littoral waters is problematic because of the difficulties of surveillance. The preferred methods of surveillance in the ocean are acoustic. In littoral waters, acoustic methods fail because noise from the surf and reflections from the shallow bottom convolute acoustic signatures beyond our capacity to discern them. Water absorbs light, reducing the effectiven ...

In phase I, Dot Metrics Technologies demonstrated the feasibility of a new method of introducing deep-green luminescent nanostructure into semiconductor materials for light-emitting device applications. The materials were used to fabricate and characterize preliminary optoelectronic device test structures. In phase II, Dot Metrics Technologies proposes to leverage these new materials and methods i ...

Power generation, power distribution and electric propulsion on ships and aerospace vehicles could be made smaller, lighter, more efficient, more versatile, and lower maintenance by operating these systems—partly or entirely—at cryogenic temperatures. Our goal is to demonstrate the advantages of cryogenic operation in regard to electronic components, specifically semiconductor devices (power d ...

The goal of this project is to produce prototypes of a modular solid state heat pump based on a novel thermoelastic effect. The heat pumps will be tested in a portable, battery powered cooler for a chemical suit, such as those used in environments subjected to bio-chemical attacks. The new thermoelastic heat pump is particularly suited for such an application because it has high power density (s ...

For this Phase II SBIR Project, Vcom3D will develop and demonstrate a modular architecture for avatars whose behavior can be easily modified to model different cultures and contexts. Our approach will be to separate the "meaning and intent" of character interactions from the culturally-specific ways in which individual characters convey this meaning and intent through speech, gesture, and action. ...

In Phase I of this effort RTI performed ammonia evaporative spray cooling (ESC) experiments on both 2 cm^2 and 21 cm^2 surfaces to establish feasibility and scalability of ESC to cool 500 W/cm^2 while maintaining temperature uniformity within +/-2.5C over the entire surface area. RTI's two-phase ESC approach achieved this performance with 10x less coolant flow rate than traditional single-phase w ...