Award Data

This proposal is for a Team Oriented Resource Management and Control (TORMAC) solution to the problem of distributed decision-making for resource constrained platforms in complex environments. As autonomous unmanned vehicles (UXV), sensor and manned vehicle capabilities have proliferated, it is more important to find ways of coordinating these assets towards common objectives in an evolving, commu ...

Precision-guided munitions have demonstrated dramatic effects with minimal collateral damage. New technology developed specifically to deny them accurate guidance information is now feasible, even for non-traditional adversaries. Further, digital communications are flooding the air with signals that interfere with communications many guidance methods rely on. Swarms of small, covert small Uncrewed ...

The US requires standoff precision strike capabilities in GPS-denied and high threat environments. This includes fire-and-forget lock-after-launch vision-based guidance for SOPGM. Due to emerging threats, a paradigm shift is occurring in the way we gather intelligence, maintain surveillance, and perform reconnaissance. ISR platforms are evolving, and artificial intelligence is at the forefront of ...

Rare Earth Elements (REEs) are essential for modern electronics and defense systems, yet the US is dependent on foreign sources for these compounds. This proposed work will create an economical and efficient method for harvesting REE from domestic soil and waste sources by enabling high throughput methods of identifying microbes, in complex media, that are capable of uptaking REEs through biologic ...

Page 2 of 2 The Department of Defense (DoD) must negotiate profit that is fair and reasonable to both the Buyer and the Seller. The DoD relies on profit to both attract the investment capital of innovative contractors and provide an incentive to perform efficiently. It relies heavily on the concept that the relationship between profit and risk should be proportional. At first, this seems to be a t ...

Memory sticks are a convenient mechanism for portable data storage and transfer. Unfortunately, the embedded microcontroller required to present raw flash as a USB peripheral exposes an attack surface that can enable privilege escalation on a host computer even in the presence of tamper-resistant device designs, data encryption, and host protections such as anti-virus software. We propose Twi ...

A USB device is one of the most common mass storage devices. However, a UAS device is known to be vulnerable to many cyber threats.  The proposed effort is to develop a Highly Assured Secure (HAS) Data Storage Device.  HAS device is a mass storage solution to provide highly assured, trustworthy, and detectable data storage.

To achieve the requisite fast, dynamic thermal switching times, we postulate the use of a Photonic Crystal (PC) filament operating at l=1-2mm. Our electrically biased PC design will be super thin to allow for fast on-off intensity-switching. It will have a small thermal mass and exhibit laser-like input-output characteristics, i.e. “Planck laser”. We will provide a theoretical framework for ou ...

Physical Sciences Inc. (PSI) and the University of Wisconsin, Madison propose to develop a multilayer emissivity control coating (MECC) for active and passive thermal emission control. PSI will fabricate a thermochromic emissivity control coating based on vanadium dioxide (VO2) and validate its ability to modulate broadband thermal signature contrast by >10:1 with a switching time of 1 µs. We wil ...

Spatial disorientation errors in pilots of both civilian and military persuasion have plagued aviation for over 100 years.  This persistence suggests that the disruption of a subconscious orientational system might be partially at fault, influencing pilot decisions that lead to these often-fatal errors.  Our collaborators at Caltech recently discovered that alpha waves in the human brain respond ...