Award Data

Combining information from disparate sensors can lead to better situational awareness and improved inference performance; unfortunately, traditional multi-sensor fusion cannot capture complex dependencies among different objects in a scene, nor can it exploit context to further boost performance. Integrating context information within a fusion architecture to reason cohesively about scenes of inte ...

It is proposed that using additive manufacturing to fabricate a lightweight optic would result in a weight reduction of the optical system, since 3D-printing provides superior flexibility in the geometric design of the lightweight optic. In addition, the conventional approach to lightweight an optic requires machining of mechanically-hard optical substrates such as SiC, which is time-intensive an ...

Physical Sciences Inc. (PSI) proposes to design, develop, and demonstrate a portable, non-invasive, real-time sensor to assess the chemical and physical health of solid rocket motors as a function of age without affecting the motors integrity nor having direct contact with the propellant. In Phase II, a sensor to monitor specific gas species that are markers of the chemical and mechanical aging pr ...

Active defects negatively impact the performance of IRFPAs by increasing noise at various levels up to, and including, catastrophic degradation. Evidence indicates that"killer defects"are related to the interaction of open core screw dislocations with impurities that remain after substrate preparation, prior to HgCdTe growth. This impurity diffusion creates a conducting channel that shorts the j ...

For HgCdTe infrared focal plane arrays fabricated on Si substrates, a model has recently been proposed to account for the disparity between the density of failed pixels and the density of dislocations that are present in the HgCdTe junction region. The model distinguishes between active and inactive dislocations and offers a hypothesis that dislocations are active only when they intersect particul ...

Silicon wafers oriented on (112) are the preferred substrates for deposition of mercury cadmium telluride layers by molecular beam epitaxy. Surface defects introduced during polishing of the wafers degrade the quality of the epitaxy and the performance of infrared detectors fabricated within these materials. We propose a process for reducing the density of the defects that are inherent in the si ...

An innovative, super-miniature, fast-switching array-based photonic time delay device is being developed for the active electronically scanned-array (AESA) MDA and Navy radars. The design is based on the fast electro-optic effect, the super miniature fiber-lens collimation array, and the existing WDM photonic true time delay technologies. In Phase I Agiltron has successfully demonstrated the core ...

The objective of this proposal is to further develop IV-VI PbSnSe detectors epitaxially grown on Si substrates. The motivation of fabricating IV-VI detector arrays on Si is based on the following advantages of IV-VI Pb-salt semiconductors. (1) The large dielectric constant helps screen and localize the defect related effects. (2) The epitaxial material on Si is highly uniform, and thus the cutoff ...

It is proposed to develop, model, and demonstrate composite case materials with sympathetic responses to slow cookoff. In phase II, the proposed study will focus upon conducting subscale SCO testing on composite case materials and validate a physics based modeling and simulation tool. Subscale motor case dimensions will be analogue to a specific MDA rocket booster.

We are proposing an innovative approach to sensor fusion and target recognition based on transductive inference with support vector machines. Our proposed algorithm will apply innovative discrimination to the fusion of sensor (feature) and contextual scenario information through the development of robust algorithms and software necessary to collect, process, and fuse information from multiple sour ...