Award Data

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) functions as virtual tutors that adapt to student responses. Such ITSs, however, do not yield student learning improvements equivalent to students tutored by human instructors. Ascertaining Un-Reported Affect (AURA) is a closed-loop, platform-independent “front-end” for informing ITSs with near real-time inferences of student engagement and affect during lea ...

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is seeking a software architecture that allows new and advanced navigation sensors to be integrated with an existing navigation system. To demonstrate this technology, DARPA desires a design for a personal navigator leveraging this technology that is capable of providing a location fix with an accuracy of 10 meters 3D rms. This navigator needs ...

This project describes research that will lead to the commercialization of the Tool Dashboard, a new technique for pre-process milling parameter selection. In this approach, dynamic models of the cutting tool and holder will be analytically coupled to spindle-machine measurements to predict the tool point dynamics. Given this information, stability lobe diagrams, which display stable and unstable ...

Existing machine tool metrology methods measure the quasistatic errors of a machine tool and, thus, evaluate its static positioning accuracy. Yet machine tools are dynamic, they do not stop and pause in an effort to reach a programmed position. Additionally, current techniques do not identify all of the errors, many of which significantly impact the volumetric accuracy of the machine. Almost immed ...

In modern battlespace, deployment of chemical and biological agents by our adversaries is a threat that needs to be addressed. These agents are cheap to manufacture and easily available. Their effects can be devastating to our troops. Detecting chemical and biological agents often require bulky equipment in a laboratory. Identifying the agents could take many minutes in such facilities. A more eff ...

The objective of this work is development of a new sensor system to rapidly detect and diagnose biological threats to the public, including microbial and toxic agents. A unique, new photonic resonance sensor concept implemented with subwavelength waveguide gratings is applied to monitor each detection event in real-time. Due to inherent polarization diversity, multiple resonance peaks shift their ...

The use of graphite fiber reinforced composite materials in Navy ship applications has a number of potential benefits that can be attributed to the material’s high specific strength and stiffness. However, graphite fiber can form a galvanic cell with the steel structure, especially at the joints between the composite and steel, promoting corrosion that degrades both the composite and the steel. ...

There are many mundane tasks that humans – even children – perform easily, yet are unattainable by current robotic systems. These include dexterous manipulation in unstructured environments, where the exact location and characteristics of the objects are not known a priori, such as picking fruit or doing dishes. Recent years have seen many advances in both robotic manipulation and machine vis ...