Award Data

The automated inspection of gas turbine components has proven to be difficult due to their complex geometry. While ultrasonics has demomstrated excellent capabilities in detecting and characterizing the erosion and corrosion on turbine components from the hot effluent gases, it's application details laborious alignment procedures for the ultrasonic transducer during inspection. The need for automa ...

Reliability and lifetime performance data for environemntal control systems (ECS) is limited. Real-time tests require 5-15 years, and results often apply only to obsolete technology. Accelerated life testing (ALT) is a means by which reliability data may be obtained quickly and at a reasonable cost. A primary difficulty with ALT of ECS units is that typical service conditions impose multiple stres ...

M-Vision Inc., along with the University of Michigan and Michigan State University, proposes to develop a new and novel solution to the problem of target detection and discrimination in a complex scene. This solution is obtained by innovatively combining Gabor wavelets and scale space inference. The result is a computational model of human perception that resembles the human visual system in its ...

General aviation and commuter aircraft generally do not have adequate deicing equipment to operate safely in all types of icing conditions. Since icing forecasts are not yet sufficiently reliable for pilots to avoid icing conditions, an airborne system that remotely detects icing conditions ahead of the aircraft could prevent serious accidents. The National Oceanic and Atrmospheric Administratio ...

The application of advanced barrel coatings to provide extended erosion and wear life with high performance ammunition for existing and proposed weapons systems has been limited by the available process technologies capable of applying the required/desired coatings. Electroplating, Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD), and Physical Vapor Deposition (PVD) have all been attempted with varying degrees of ...

To develop faster and larger pulse-coupled neural networks (PCNN) for image processing, Bosonics will design and simulate a 64 by 64 neuron chip with optical inputs and outputs. PCNN have been shown to be effective at fast analog pre-processing of detector data, image transforms, and automatic target recognition. In Phase I Bosonics will 1) define the image processing application specifications ...

Here OptiMetrics Inc. proposes to develop an Information Architecture for the simulation of intelligence information, processes and sensors that are the components of C3I systems. That Information Architecture (IA) builds on the concepts of High Level Architecture (HLA) for DIS. It would provide the logical structure for the integration of existing and future intelligence simulations and for eva ...

As a candidate OHC-IFP panel concept, Industrial Honeycomb Structures, Inc. proposes an innovative fiber-reinforced-polymer honeycomb core material sandwiched between two fiber-reinforced- polymer skins. These materials are light weight, high strength, tough, resilient, and highly producible, but need to be qualified for ballistic protection. The honeycomb cores appear promising as a means for lim ...

This SBIR Phase I project will create an event representation framework and generate a catalogue of reasoning mechanisms for transforming domain specific events into a convenient representational framework. The choice of the representation scheme used to model a domain for analysis by the neural network of fuzzy logic system can make an enormous difference in the ease and efficiency of the proble ...

We propose the application of HEMS technology to the development of a tactile finger tip display device for operation in conjunction with finger force reflective devices. By co~ining high bandwidth finger tip acutation with lower bandwidth, large motion finger force reflection, we hope to gain full range-of-motion dexterity with the impression of sensitive surface touch. For medical diagnostic ...