Award Data

The goal of this program is to design a lightweight optical bench capable of remaining stable under temperature and moisture changes, while isolating the precision optical array from vibrations such as engine noise and air turbulence. By integrating a customizable periodic stack in the bench, vibrations are attenuated more effectively than commercially available mounts. Additionally, the periodic ...

We propose a novel computational framework for discrimination that incorporates sensor data from observations of the engagement and from kill assessment (KA) that such sensors can provide. The KA information is combined with data from other sensors to improve the discrimination decision and to reduce the probability of correlated shots. Approved for Public Release 16-MDA-8620 (1 April 16)

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 ...

Missile defense faces the challenges of rapidly maturing and evolving complex threats, possessing capabilities which require the use of all available resources to successfully detect, track and identify the lethal objects. Future performance will rely on multiple sensors such as ground and sea based radars and electro-optical and infrared sensors for target recognition. It is crucial to develop a ...

Our proposed second order uncertainty (SOU) product is a decision making software solution that addresses the problem of providing accurate and precisely defined decision courses of action (COAs) of complex, time-constrained problems in a fraction of the time required by alternative methods striving to achieve the same level of precision. Complex decision situations can deal with large volume of ...

Mainstream Engineering Corporation is developing a prognostic health monitoring system for missile electronics. Called the Weapon Inspection, Sustainment, and Recorder Device (WISARD), this stamp-sized health monitoring system operates on 3.6 mW of power and measures temperature, vibration, and humidity to estimate the remaining life of an electronics assembly. In Phase I, we developed the failure ...

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 ...

The ISSAC Team propose a novel method to encapsulate legacy models and simulations that allows these components to take advantage of modern, multi-core, multi-processor hardware suites. Encapsulating these legacy codes provides 3 primary advantages to deal with complex systems and systems of systems (Air Force, Navy, Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) ...

The objectives of our Phase I effort are to characterize target sensor measurement uncertainties and feature extraction uncertainties; determine how and where, in the processing chain, these affect target discrimination and classification; show how the different sources of uncertainty lead to the cumulative uncertainty in the final decision; provide techniques that will be instrumental to optimizi ...

Missile defense takes place in an uncertain and dynamic environment, so multi-sensor fusion must be employed to aggregate and merge disparate data from the battlefield. However, the fusion process is hindered by the vast amount of uncertainty in operational contexts, such as imprecise measurements and varying environmental conditions. Various algorithms and fusion processes have been developed to ...