Award Data

A Battlefield Airman (BA) has one of the most challenging positions in the military. BA personnel are tasked with the dual roles of being warfighters as well as Combat Controllers, Pararescuemen, Tactical Air Control Party (TACP) members and Special Operations Weather Technicians often while behind enemy lines. These complex duties require high fidelity training. In some cases, such as Pararescuem ...

ColdQuanta, in partnership with Dr. Zoya Popovic at the University of Colorado at Boulder, proposes to develop a three-dimensional quantum-enhanced radio-frequency (RF) signal sensor and direction finder. Our approach combines Rydberg-atom-based RF electrometry and discrete lens arrays (DLAs) of planar antennas. The DLA will serve as a Fourier optic for an incident wave, and a Rydberg-atom RF elec ...

To address the challenge of long-term tracking, through extended occlusions and significant appearance changes, we propose to continue developing DC-CAT, a Deep Convolutional neural network (CNN) based Confuser-Aware high value target (HVT) Tracker.The DC-CAT system combines a state-of-the-art CNN-based adaptive HVT tracker with a CNN-based pre-trained generic target detector, in a deep-feature-ai ...

Current scene projection hardware is challenged to simultaneously meet the requirements for high peak temperature (> 2000K), high resolution (2Kx2K), response time < 4 ms, cryogenic and temporally uniform photon flux. MEMS, Resistor arrays, liquid crystals, and photonic crystals all suffer in one or more areas. MEMS suffer from flicker and low dynamic range. Resistor arrays suffer from low frame r ...

High speed air vehicles operate at material strength performance limits and are at significant risk when subjected to additional localized heating that can result in softening, pitting and burn-through the material and potentially change the vehicle structural profile. These effects degrade aerodynamic performance. The team of CFDRC and UDRI proposed to develop, validate and deliver a comprehensiv ...

To understand how insects and crustaceans sense and process light fields, researchers need a projection system that provides realistic wide field of view (FOV), high-speed imagery from UV to red (320-650nm) that includes polarization control. Insects and crustaceans have vastly different visual acuity and wavelength response from humans. In addition, some can sense polarization. Therefore, commerc ...

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) can be reliably used to perform on-line health monitoring of any type of structures with minimal human involvement. Current SHM systems can perform the functions required but are heavy, bulky and difficult to integrate with the structure to provide on-board real-time structural integrity assessment. Embedding of currently available sensors and electronics used by ...

Advanced imaging techniques and, novel intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) methods are of great interest to the U.S. Air Force and other Department of Defense (DoD) agencies, but associated high-costs of III-V and II-VI MWIR and SWIR materials prohibit their practical widespread deployment and integration with other optoelectronic devices. In this program, we intend to investigate ...

A diagnostic is proposed for obtaining instantaneous three-dimensional volumetric distributions of density in a flow field at velocities ranging from subsonic to supersonic. Multiple Sheet Filtered Rayleigh Scattering (MSFRS) will be developed, which enables a series of two-dimensional images to be rapidly obtained making up a volumetric image while suppressing background scattering from wind tunn ...

The U.S. Air Force is interested in developing hypersonic vehicles including reusable transport aircraft, cruise missiles, and unmanned systems. Hypersonic flight regimes result in multifaceted and very difficult design challenges that can be encapsulated into an aerothermoelastic problem, which is a complex interaction of structural, thermal, and aerodynamic mechanisms. When a flexible structural ...