Award Data

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: Animal-borne electronic instruments (tags) are critical tools for monitoring the behavior and ecology of cetaceans, providing data needed for managing their populations and mitigating the threats they face. Although remote-deployment of tags onto cetaceans that cannot be captured has provided valuable data, attachment durations have been frustratingly short and variable. Our Ph ...

The inability to plan in real-time is a major reason why robot manufacturing is restricted to high-value, high-volume products, in carefully engineered factories where robots blindly repeat pre-programmed trajectories. Today, robots simply cannot generate collision-free motion on the fly. We are solving this core problem—real-time motion planning in unstructured, fluid environments and on divers ...

Over the past decade, GTL has developed a suite of transformational technologies that provide superior performance for reduced cost.Each of these technologies have been matured to TRL 6 and establish the technical foundation for the Advanced Cryogenic Expendable (ACE) Multi-Role Vehicle (ACE-MRV). The ACE-MRV is a high-performance expendable rocket stage that can either be launched (from the groun ...

Use of"Smartphones"and cellular networks is becoming an increasing priority for military applications. By placing the source of information directly with the solider on the ground via a Smartphone, the vision of"every soldier a sensor"becomes attainable. mZeal proposes to facilitate this vision with the Adaptive Multi-Media Streaming for Android (AMMSTAR) system. AMMSTAR will capture photographic ...

The Electromagnetic Plasmoid Thruster (EMPT) has demonstrated the ability to ionize, electromagnetically accelerate, and eject a broad range of complex and chemically-reactive molecular gases, including monopropellants. EMPT has the potential to dramatically increase the operational range of existing electric propulsion (EP) systems in both power density, power throttling, and propellant choice. P ...

Severe weather impacts our daily lives, society and nation’s economy. From an average of $10B (2005 dollars) annual loss due to tropical cyclones since 1900 to $200B in the commercial shipping industry that is threatened by severe ocean storms to the hundreds of lives and assets being lost in the $20B recreational boating industry. In these cases and many more, accurate now-casting and forecasti ...

Social network analysis is a powerful method for making sense of an increasingly interconnected world. Developing social network analysis tools requires datasets with which to test them, but sharing datasets is problematic because of privacy issues. Initial attempts to anonymize network datasets proved ineffective due to de-anonymization attacks that leveraged publically available information to i ...

Operations centers for tactical military activities, incident response, and other domains all involve multiple teams of individuals interacting with people and systems within and outside of their organization to enable continuous mission success. In these organizations, effective coordination and collaboration is critical. To improve collaboration, an end-to-end sensor and analysis technology is n ...

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: Tropospheric oxidation capacity is dominated by HOx photochemistry, however halogen atoms and oxides significantly affect these chemical cycles. A sensitive and robust measurement of gaseous HCl is critically important to improve our understanding of halogen chemistry and its impacts on the spatial and temporal oxidation capacity of the atmosphere. In Phase I, we met all of our ...

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: Recent advances in gas chromatographic (GC) and mass spectrometric (MS) techniques for atmospheric measurements have led to highly complex data sets that have overwhelmed the capabilities of current data analysis software. We propose a new method for the automated reduction of chromatographic data using peak-fitting algorithms. By relying upon constrained peak-fit parameterizat ...