Award Data

The Navy has need of assessing the river environment including bathymetry, flow velocity profile, and navigational obstructions. While improvements in measurement fidelity and reduction in cost have come about by the use of multiple drifters, measurement quality is lost due to convergent drifter trajectories, and cost/risk remains high due to personnel effort required for deployment. An autonomous ...

G2 Software Systems (G2SS) proposes to explore all features of Google Wave to develop practices and extensions to support Navy Command and Control (C2) processes. The C2 practices and extensions include tools for collaborative problem analysis, collaborative planning, knowledge sharing, knowledge awareness (searching and registering for critical information requirements), knowledge context (includ ...

Existing riverine drifters are passive devices designed to capture, store and transmit river flow and bathymetry information. Problems inherent with passively drifting devices include the inability to maintain uniform cross-stream spatial coverage and lost drifters due to unintentional grounding and entanglement with various hazards present in a typical river environment. This proposal outlines a ...

We propose to design, develop, implement, simulate, and demonstrate an autonomous control and sensing system for the safe vertical landing of autonomous aerial cargo delivery system (ACDS). The landing site is expected to be unprepared mountain sides with slopes up to 15 degrees and rough terrain containing rocks and brush. We also plan to reduce the amount of ground equipment required to operate ...

We will demonstrate the feasibility of detecting tactically meaningful complex events in sensor input streams using an efficient pattern matching technology embodied in the Soar cognitive architecture. Our focus in Phase I will be on video streams, such as those that might be produced by unattended ground sensors or unmanned aerial systems. To reduce risk, we propose devoting a portion of our effo ...

Thermo-mechanical processes of turbine disks have been progressively improved to meet microstructural requirements tailored for advanced, sustainable high temperature performances. However, the chemistry of typical Ni-base turbine disk alloys is very complex, and yields a variety of phases and microstructural anomalies under different thermo-mechanical heat treatments. These microstructural hetero ...

Advances in electronically controlled injection technologies for diesel engines have provided a method to improve medium- to heavy-duty engine performance through increased injection pressures, multiple injections, and injection rate shaping. Although these injection systems have been primarily limited to larger engines, the ability to rapidly and precisely meter fuel for smaller engines is partic ...

In miniature gas turbines for UAV applications, traditional bearings exhibit a typical lifetime of only 25 hours due to excessive axial loading. Mainstream proposes to use a passive, permanent magnet thrust bearing to alleviate this problem and increase service life to over 1000 hours. Since this type of bearing is non-contacting, it can operate at very high rotational speeds with minimal heat gen ...

Intelligent Fiber Optic Systems Corporation (IFOS) and Georgia Tech propose a fiber Bragg grating (FBG) integrated sensor system capable of measuring the pipe wall "breathing mode" in order to infer the fluid-borne sound pressure level (SPL) in a pipe. The proposed new measurement technique makes it possible to externally measure the fluid-borne sound level in a noisy piping system. The state-of-a ...

IFOS will demonstrate the feasibility of a minimalistic, yet powerful, distributed network of piezoelectric actuators and ultrasonic wave detecting fiber optic Bragg grating (FBG) sensors interrogated by a high frequency parallel processing FBG interrogator together with innovative mathematical and computational algorithms to process, store and visualize (via damage index maps) massive amounts of ...