Award Data

The Ground-Based Interceptor (GBI) missile is the weapon component of the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system that consists of a rocket booster and kinetic kill vehicle. Recently, MDA has sought technologies to improve the performance of the booster vehicle (BV). To date, studies have shown that reductions in weight have a direct impact on overall effectiveness. The current proposal aims t ...

The littoral environment is especially demanding on tactical sonar systems, in large part because the spatial and temporal variability imposes sonar system operating conditions of a nature and with a scale heretofore not encountered in the open oceans. Recent Office of Naval Research (ONR) sponsored basic research as well as fleet exercises have shown that littoral environments tactically importan ...

This STTR project develops an innovative seed fabrication technology to address the fundamental size-quality limitation of gallium nitride (GaN) substratesthe indispensable key component for GaN-based vertical high-power devices. Currently, there is no viable GaN technology to realize large-area and low-defect substrates simultaneously. The technology producing 6" and larger GaN wafers results in ...

To meet the U.S. Navy, specifically PMA-201, need for nondestructive evaluation (NDE) of concrete, including evaluating its strength, material properties, and damage localization, Luminit, LLC, and Southern Illinois University (SIU) propose to develop a novel Concrete Materials Characterization (COMAC) system, combining several methods of concrete characterization into a single sensor/software com ...

With MEDUSAE, our world class team proposes to leverage our extensive experience, existing technology, and a unique approach to lightweight, long lasting, self-recharging jellyfish-inspired floats to fill an oceanographic sensing capability gap for the Navy. Our experience in bio-inspired robot (including jellyfish), nonconventional actuation, and energy harvesting development promises to provide ...

Face recognition performance using deep learning has seen dramatic improvements in recent years. This improvement has been fueled in part by the curation of large labeled training datasets with millions of images of hundreds of thousands of subjects.This results in effective generalization for matching over pose, illumination, expression and age variation, however these datasets have traditionally ...

Recognizing faces in low-light and nighttime conditions is a challenging problem due to the noisy and poor quality nature of the images.Thermal imaging is often used to obtain facial biometric in such conditions. Thermal face images, while having a strong signature at nighttime, are not typically maintained in biometric-enabled watch lists and so must be compared with visible-light face images to ...

The Biomagnetics Micro Dosimetry System (BMDS) program will design, model, and simulate a microdosimetry system that can measure and create a three dimensional map of weak radiofrequency signals in biological organisms. The heart of the BMDS project is the front end called a Quinc, that delivers very sensitive, broad band measurements with high spatial resolution.The Quinc based front end is a val ...

Metasurfaces are a fascinating new direction for producing small form factor optical elements that can be directly integrated with a variety of sensors and illumination sources. Metasurfaces have received extensive attention for their potential applications in imaging optics as they enable significantly more compact camera modules with enhanced functionality and because the unit processes to creat ...

Target detection and recognition is a challenging problem because of changes in appearance, viewing direction, occlusion and other covariates. Systems that can accurately and efficiently detect and track objects can provide several benefits in surveillance, monitoring and other applications. As part of this effort, we propose to develop a robust learning-based approach to detect, track and recogni ...