Award Data

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This grant proposes an innovative approach to prevent low back pain and injury associated with prolonged seating. Specifically, we propose to integrate lumbar extensor muscle strengthening with ergonomic task seating. By doing so, we will provide the public with a means to address two primary causes of low back pain and injury: 1) poor or prolonged seating po ...

This project develops a technology to automate the interpretation and understanding of complex trees of source code and related artifacts for conversion to run on newer hardware, operating systems and languages. The center of our proposed innovative approach is to map and parse a complex source code tree (plus related artifacts such as ‘makefiles’) into an appropriate process and object orien ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The shortage of healthcare workers is accelerating. An longer-living, ageing population is demanding more medical service while healthcare worker retirements and high turnover is decreasing the worker pool. Shortages ca n be reduced or eliminated by scheduling only the number of staff needed to meet the hour-by-hour demand for medical service and using flexible ...

Today, the American farmer and consumer is looking for nontoxic products to control pests. Biological control and related technologies have the potential to provide these nontoxic solutions for the control of plant pests and to increase plant growth and yield. Among the direct effects of biocontrol agents are: (a) disease control through induced resistance, (b) increased growth of roots and shoots ...

Increasing the power density of current jet aircraft engines requires the replacement of conventional high temperature materials by new materials capable of operating at higher temperatures. Ceramics and ceramic matrix composites (CMCs) represent excellent candidates for increased use in hot engine parts due to their ability to withstand temperatures in excess of 2000 C. Due to the complexity of t ...

Orion requires a rendezvous and docking sensor to provide relative navigation information during proximity operations and docking. In order to dock, the sensor must provide full six degree of freedom (6 DOF) relative position and relative attitude information at a rate sufficient for the rendezvous spacecraft guidance system to robustly control the docking maneuver. Orion faces critical weight iss ...

Visually degraded environment (VDE) conditions pose a threat to Navy and Marine Corps helicopter by dramatically decreasing pilots’ situational awareness. Brownout and whiteout conditions are especially dangerous. Sensors such as laser radar (LADAR) imaging sensors can see through dust, snow and fog by gating past obscurants, but in order to provide the pilot with imagery that most closely resem ...

Maritime asymmetric air threat detection begins with an in depth comprehension of the tactical picture. Security lies in the ability to sense threats in all environments. Advanced Optical Systems, Inc. (AOS) and Technology Systems, Inc. (TSI) have joined together to propose APSTAAT, a system for autonomous persistent surveillance for the asymmetric air threat. Low, slow flyers are threats to surfa ...

The Army needs smaller and cheaper precision weapon systems. Semi-Active Laser guidance (SAL), invented in the 1960’s at the Army Missile command, is a powerful approach to smart weapons. In the past, SAL seekers used quadrant detectors, narrow field-of-view optics, gimbals, and actuators. While very effective, they are expensive. Several programs are desperate for a low-cost solution. One drivi ...

The objective of this proposal is build an, all electronic, photonic band gap (PBG) scanning device using high performance electro-optic (EO) polymers for beam steering. The PBG device will take advantage of the superprism effect in PBG structures. PBG’s h have been shown to have an effective refraction several orders of magnitude greater than conventional materials. The beam will be steered by ...