Award Data

Small multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are well suited for sensing and situational awareness missions in closed, confined, and constrained (C3) environments. However, autonomous navigation of small VTOL UAVs is very challenging in C3 environments. Current state of the art navigation methods uses vision and LIDAR to build a map, localize, and plan paths. These methods tend to be computati ...

There is a need to improve the understanding of physical and chemical processes involved in the evolution of chemical warfare agent (CWA) simulant aerosols and vapors that are interacting with combustion, deflagration, and detonation products. However, the measurement of aerosols and vapors is very challenging because of limited knowledge of the photophysics at varying temperatures and pressures, ...

An important application for geospatial 3D models is fast transmission and rendering for disadvantaged users who have only a web browser and a limited bandwidth connection. Point cloud models commonly used within the NGA are too large for efficient transmission and rendering. Kitware’s new research on the IARPA CORE3D program has demonstrated procedural building models from point clouds for more ...

The NGA requires an automatic, unsupervised SAR feature extraction (AUFE) technique, that can ultimately be deployed for geospatial analysis, modeling, and target detection. Our proposed “SAR Unsupervised and Robust Feature ExtractoR” (SURFER) solution includes in Phase I: (1) a sound and deterministic assessment of the underlying RF phenomenology and SAR processing theoretical basis for effec ...

Creating comprehensive geospatial datasets requires that National Geospatial Agency (NGA) analysts spend large amounts of time searching for, delineating, and labeling non-moving features in overhead imagery. This tiresome and tedious task can negatively impact not only the analysts’ work satisfaction but also the resulting data quality. Fortunately, recent advances in gamification and crowdsour ...

With respect to digital imaging sensors and systems, obtaining as many pixels on target is a necessity to classify or identify a target for real-time operations and forensic analysis within the intelligence community. Rather than relying on improved sensors, the approach originally solicited and further refined here utilizes super-resolution image processing techniques to provide more detail in th ...

The commercial small satellite provider Planet is expanding towards global coverage at a daily revisit rate at the cost of lower resolution imagery than satellite providers like DigitalGlobe. The lower resolution diminishes the effectiveness of Planet in many surveillance applications that would greatly benefit from its coverage and revisit rate. We therefore propose a single image super resolutio ...

ABSTRACT: Autonomous vehicles lack a standardized mechanism for seamless cross-platform sharing of testing frameworks and evaluations of basic tasks. The ability to execute common tests on various hardware platforms is essential in order to be able to e

Detection of chemical and biological warfare agents in a real-world setting is an increasingly urgent problem. Many of the current state-of-the-art sensors are aqueous based and require large biomolecules, such as antibodies, to achieve binding of the target molecule and subsequent reporting of the binding event. These technical hurdles are a drawback when considering deployment of these technol ...

Weidlinger Associates Inc. proposes to develop effective technology for simulating explosive detonations within civil buildings where the propagation of airblast and failure of weak internal walls are strongly coupled. We will conduct a field test program designed to complement other internal detonation testing efforts such as DTRA''s Distinct Cobra, expanding the available database. We will perfo ...