Award Data

This Navy SBIR Phase II effort will develop the processing steps required to fabricate high quality periodically poled stoichiometric lithium tantalate (PPSLT) and demonstrate its utility for use in both current and emerging Airborne Laser Mine Detection Systems (ALMDS) by enabling highly efficient laser wavelenth conversion. The proposed optical material will also support the development of shor ...

The VIRGINIA Class submarine employs the Light-Weight Wide Aperture Array (LWWAA) hull-mounted array of fiber-optic hydrophones that requires the use of high performance, narrowband lasers. In this Navy Phase II SBIR effort, a prototype laser for the LWWAA hull-array sensor will be developed using the frequency-stabilized semiconductor laser technology demonstrated during the Phase I effort. The ...

The proposed approach provides a high performance mechanical optical fiber splice of single piece construction. Leveraging on advanced glass and polymer material processing technologies, the new splice design offers advantageous attributes of compactness for use with minimum space intrusion, passive self-alignment of the fiber core in all directions, easy guided fiber insertion, quick action, an ...

Inspection of printed circuit boards (PCB) to detect and repair defects is critical for the readiness of military equipment. A new technology is needed to perform sophisticated characterization of defects, and predict the remaining life of electronics without costly, PCB and IC specific hardware and software. The technology proposed by RMD could revolutionize the nondestructive evaluation (NDE) o ...

In shallow water environments or using broadband processing,detection statistics enerated from sonar data can exhibit highly non-Gaussian statistics due to the discrete nature of the returns from different clutter elements in different range resolution cells. Optimal likelihood detectors rely crucially on accurate estimation of the clutter distribution, and poor fits to an assumed Gaussian probabi ...

Network centric warfare promises to increase information sharing and allow distribution of decision making. This will improve military effectiveness, but only if the situational awareness (SA) of warfighters is correctly aligned. IMAGES is a software tool that will infer the cognitive states of individuals and groups engaged in cognitive collaboration and measure group SA by exploiting data on the ...

The dissemination of data collected from undersea systems historically has been accomplished via cable and/or by RF telemetry. In many cases the available (limited) signal processing capability has required the transmission of raw or only slightly processed data to the end user. Because of limited telemetry bandwidths, only a few sensors could therefore be active at any one time. Due to recent ...

The US Navy will use growing numbers of unmanned autonomous vehicles to perform a variety of functions including mine surveillance and subsurface mapping, particularly in connection with missions for the Littoral Combat Ship. These functions are often performed by deployment of sensors, sources and arrays from organic offboard vehicles (OOVs). During Phase I of this project, Bluefin Robotics Corp. ...

Advanced ice prevention technology is required to meet the US Navy's needs in protecting ship superstructures and personnel from the damaging effects of ice accretion. Severe ice accretion on ship superstructures can result in drastic loss of stability and handling. Many de-icing methods have been developed around the concept of mechanical or thermal energy. These methods are efficient but they ...

We have developed a hybrid inference system for data fusion (DF) and situation assessment (SA) for multi-source intelligence analysis, with specific application to Marine Corps operations in urban environments. The approach views an urban environment as a complex dynamic system whose state vector is composed of a large number of both discrete and continuous variables (hence is hybrid) representing ...