Award Data

The control technology under development enables human operators to teach anthropomorphic robots, in the field, how to perform new complex tasks. Building upon existing inverse kinematics, rule-based control, and neural network learning technology, the training method enhances robot capabilities through operator supervision. The current innovation enables the online construction of rule-based plan ...

The main goal of this project is contructing a lightweight, low-cost, real-time ultrasound system for bone assessment that could readily be used in long term space flights as well as in a variety of environments in general medical practice. The major goal of Phase I of this project was to construct a functional prototype of the BUSS and to demonstrate in model experiments that the device is capabl ...

Recent developments have illustrated the tremendous potential of very small-scale rotorcraft (Micro Rotorcraft or MRCs) for entirely new missions such as remote sensing, surveillance, and autonomous exploration. Vehicle design at this scale is constrained by performance limitations inherent in operating at low Reynolds number. This effort will exploit new, lightweight Shape Memory Alloy (SMA) actu ...

A potentially key element of meeting NASA?s objective of dramatically increasing aviation system capacity is the utilization of runway independent aircraft (RIAs) to provide feeder service to major airports. Among the challenges in enabling high-volume terminal area RIA operations are identifying potential hazards of this flight regime and developing simulation technology for a complex aeromechani ...

The development of new, active flow control devices will be critical to meeting the NASA Aerospace Technology Enterprise goals of reducing air travel costs by 25% in 10 years and 50% in 25 years. Continuum Dynamics, Inc. (CDI) proposes the development of a new ¿pop-up¿ vortex generator (PUVG) concept which will eliminate cruise and off-design drag penalties of conventional vortex generators thro ...

Active boundary layer control is effective in controlling boundary layer dynamics, but imposes a penalty because of the power and hardware required. In Phase I a family of self-excited Flow Driven Oscillating Vortex Generators (FDOVGs), which oscillate at frequencies where the induced vortical flows have length scales that are of the order of the scale of the aerodynamic surface, and therefore are ...

"The portable signal identification training is concise and technologically achievable. The Technical Objectives include the following:1.Generate an intended use document specifying in sufficient detail how the system will be used in training in order to facilitate a high-level hardware system operability design and performance requirements specification.2.Investigate and identify available sma ...

Current commercial sterilization units that use plasma require the use of vacuum chambers in order to generate plasma, which is stable. PlasmaSol has developed a means to maintain stable non-thermal plasma at atmospheric pressure and direct the plasma at a surface for decontamination purposes. Non-Thermal Plasmas (NTP) are ionized gases which are far from local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE) and ...

The proposal is to develop a lightning mapping system (LMS) camera based on a solid state array of smart-pixels that can detect, locate and quantify lightning transient events in the focal plane pixels without reading out the array. This concept is applicable to lightning mapping systems operating from synchronous orbit as well as low Earth orbit. In Phase I the proposed lightning/meteor detector ...

The Orbiting Wide-angle Light-collectors (OWL): Observing Cosmic Rays From Space mission is one of the space obervatories in NASA's long range plan. This proposal addresses the need for a detector array to match the several square meter focal plane of the envisaged OWL telescope, while maintaining high optical fill factor, low noise, and exposure times commensurate with the 3.3 us per km velocity ...