Award Data

With the capacity and performance of FPGAs suitable for space borne applications continuously increasing, the design of FPGAs is becoming increasingly complex involving trading off or simultaneous optimization of space, speed, and power. RNET and ANL are proposing to develop software infrastructure that facilitates automatic performance tuning of FPGAs in terms of speed, power, and size. We introd ...

The liberation of particles induced by rocket plume flow from spacecraft landing on unprepared regolith of the Moon, Mars, and other destinations poses high mission risks for robotic and human exploration activities. This process occurs in a combination of "extreme environments" that combine low gravity, little or no atmosphere, with rocket exhaust gas flow that is supersonic and partially rarefie ...

The proposed solution exploits recent advances in computer vision to conceive of a single-camera + gyro + accelerometer vision-based navigation solution such that the processing will be lightweight (requiring only a single optical flow sample per frame). Known landmarks (natural or artificial) will have absolute positions known to planetary exploration worker robots. The worker robot can identif ...

Launch vehicles experience extreme acoustic loads during liftoff driven by the interaction of rocket plumes and plume-generated acoustic waves with ground structures. Currently employed predictive capabilities to model the complex turbulent plume physics are too dissipative to accurately resolve the propagation of acoustic waves throughout the launch environment. Higher fidelity liftoff acoustic a ...

Advances in structured heterogeneity together with nanomaterials tailoring has made it possible to create thermoelectrics using high temperature, polymer composites. While such thermoelectrics do not have the capability to approach the efficiency of top performing ceramic modules such as BiTe, they do provide two unique aspects of use in energy scavenging: the ability to cover large areas easily, ...

The objective of this proposal is to develop three unique energy harvesting technologies utilizing our existing research strengths that will be of interest and utility to NASA applications and environmental conditions. By developing multiple technologies, NASA will be able to harvest energy from multiple waste energy sources, namely environmental vibrations, thermal energy, and solar flux. These d ...

The objective of this proposal is to develop instrumentation and algorithms for acquiring facial features for facial recognition in low- and no-light conditions.We will use cross-spectrum matching by exploiting infrared polarimetric imagery which tends to show features that match more closely visible imagery than conventional infrared.In addition to thermal infrared, we will also test subjects in ...

This Multiband Software Defined Radio (SDR) sensor system proposal will demonstrate the ability to operate within multiple frequency bands and across multiple technology platforms in a single transceiver. The center frequencies and bandwidths chosen are representative of current demonstrated commercial or research devices and bands used: 400 MHz, 900 MHz, and 2.4 GHz ISM bands, with bandwidths of ...

Sensatek Propulsion Technology, Inc. proposes to demonstrate the feasibility of a wireless, passive, nanoparticle-based sensor system. The sensor in its current form can be used to measure real time temperatures and pressures wirelessly without the need of an external energy source. It should be noted that the same sensing principle can be used for strain monitoring as well. It comprises of a micr ...

The research objective of the proposed work is to demonstrate feasibility of utilizing extensible modeling to create an AM knowledgebase for copper alloy, GrCop-84, and utilize it to design an AM process for GrCop-84. The work plan has three tasks: (1) Utilize process modeling to demonstrate feasibility of predicting AM process parameters for alloy GrCop-84 for the powder bed and blown powder proc ...