Award Data

Opportunity: Guayule, a US native plant, is the only alternate rubber crop with an established, mechanized, agronomic system. Problem: Low rubber yields and lack of effective resin and bagasse coproduct valorization, have prevented widespread adoption by American farmers and processors. Rubber is only made when the cytoplasmic monomer pool (isopentenyl-pyrophosphate; IPP) is larger than that requi ...

Traumatic injuries account for 30% of all life years lost in the US and is the leading cause of death for people under 46 years of age. Uncontrolled bleeding or hemorrhage constitute 30-40% of trauma related deaths and are considered to be a major cause o

Defense Health Agency (DHA) is seeking a multi-functional diagnostic to determine blood coagulopathy in real time at point-of-care (POC). Blood coagulopathy, resulting in uncontrolled bleeding, is implicated in 80% of operating room deaths and 50% of trau

Conventional methods for detecting pathogens, which are based on culturing the microorganism, are time-consuming and laborious. Machine learning provides an alternative path to identify pathogens using supervised learning algorithms. Most current computational tools utilize genomic or protein data to identify bacteria. These methods look for features in the whole genome that correlate to pathogeni ...

New pathogens, both naturally occurring and adversary-engineered, are increasingly likely to emerge and represent a significant and growing risk to global health and security. These new threats often have limited genetic similarity to prior known pathogens and cannot be identified through standard genetic tests. The application of machine learning algorithms to phenotypic tests to predict pathogen ...

Stottler Henke proposes PaCT, leveraging our related past work in computer vision and machine learning. Drawing from techniques used in ExPATSS, a Phase II SBIR effort slated for transition to the Naval fleet, PaCT will perform bacterial characterization using features derived from the phenotype of the bacteria. PaCT will predict bacterial characteristics such as pathogenicity, antibiotic resistan ...

SSCI and MIT propose to perform initial design and testing of an innovative tightly-coupled vison and GNC system for follower vehicles to achieve safe approach and station-keeping with the lead vehicle within some range tolerance and inside a 60 degree cone, under leader maneuvers and vehicle capability constraints. The resulting system is referred to as the SPRINT (Station-keeping using Perceptio ...

As unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) become more prevalent there is an increasing desire to automate UAS navigation and control. To enable future UASs to perform a wider variety of missions, the they must be able to complete autonomous relative navigation to accomplish missions. Current technologies rely heavily on GPS measurements, which are undesirable since GPS signals may be unavailable in many ...

Unmanned systems play a critical role in military operations across a wide range of missions. The DoD’s Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap identifies leader-follower tactics, swarming capabilities, sensor advancements, collision avoidance, and GPS-denied solutions as key technologies to support autonomy. Advances in these areas are needed to support coordinated multi-aircraft maneuvers and swar ...

StampPump is a postage-stamp-sized (27x27x6 mm), fully-self-contained, closed-loop insulin patch pump system that is filled at the factory with enough insulin to treat a person with T1- or trauma-induced hyperglycemia for a full week. The device is shelf stable for at least 90 days and so is compatible with critical-care or forward deployment use. We propose to augment this system with the ability ...