Award Data

Automated analysis of human activities and events on the ground from aerial videos is key to extracting critical situational awareness and gathering actionable intelligence. It poses multiple challenges, including dynamic backgrounds that can be confused with foreground, multiple simultaneous activities in the field of view, occurrence of unknown activities, and large data volume and velocity. The ...

Electronically dimmable materials with sufficiently strong visible transmission shift, color neutrality, durability and switching speeds have eluded development since the search began nearly half a century ago. We demonstrate the potential for dynamic optical dimming using plasmonic nanostructures with electrodynamic simulations of promising plasmonic metamaterial architectures. In order to achiev ...

The computing demands of future data-intensive applications far exceed the capabilities of today’s electronics and cannot be met by isolated improvements in transistor technologies or integrated circuit (IC) architectures alone. Carbon Nanotube Field-Effect Transistors (CNFET) technology has emerged as leading candidate for energy-efficient and high-performance digital systems. Unfortunatel ...

Improved cameras and unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) have led to an explosion in the amount of airborne imagery and video collected by Air Force assets, but there are not enough trained personnel to analyze this imagery in real time. Thus, targets of opportunity and threats go undetected until the chance to act on them has passed. Automatic target detection could alleviate the burden on analysts and ...

Proposed herein are novel design methodologies to create sensors for chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and/or explosive (CBRNE) detection aboard a Small Unmanned Aerial System (SUAS), as well as intelligent Bayesian-based plume analysis and source detection algorithms that offer capabilities for the Air Force above and beyond the state of the art. The assembled technical team of experts ...

Measuring the response of explosives to a variety of thermal and mechanical inputs is important to understand and ultimately predict the reaction violence of an explosive in an accident scenario. Technically, there are many challenges to overcome in observing explosives response. For instance, secondary high explosives are heterogeneous and optically opaque and often need to be confined in metal c ...

Diversified Technologies, Inc. (DTI) proposes to develop a Multiple Pulse flash X-ray source which can be used to make high resolution X-ray movies of explosive and ballistic tests. The new source will allow researchers to capitalize on recent advances in very high speed cameras which allow high resolution images with many frames. DTI will extend our world-class pulsed power capabilities to this c ...

SSCI and ASU (Prof. Nancy Cooke) propose to develop SHADE (Shared Awareness in Denied Environments) - a comprehensive decision support tool which will facilitate smooth mission execution under information degradation and losses in mixed initiative teams (MIT) involving collaborating autonomous vehicles. In Phase I we propose to perform initial development, integration and testing of the SHADE tech ...

Intuitive mission displays and planning capabilities are needed to enhance pilot and operator situation awareness when teaming with next-generation autonomous vehicles in tactical operations. To address this, we will design and demonstrate Tactical Interfaces for Teaming with Autonomy (TITAN) to increase the shared awareness for manned/unmanned teams in distributed and complex communications envir ...

hazardous chemicals such as JP8, chromium, and byproducts of led-free frangible ammunition and to hazardous environments. Of the many dangers Airmen face, the hypoxia-like unexplained physiological events pilots face are some of the most dangerous and elusive. Current wearable sensors cannot decouple complex, interdependent in vivo response. We propose to develop (design, fabricate, test, and demo ...