Award Data

Aging aircraft commonly suffers from several types of degradation including fatigue cracking and lack of bonding. It is virtually impossible to predict degradation in structural performance or when a component or structure will fail due to the inability to test new material systems under all loading conditions and under all environmental conditions. A material state awareness system using minimali ...

Compelling applications of infrared ultrafast lasers—ranging from ship self defense and aircraft self defense, to medical and micromachining applications—have defined a critical performance point at about one millijoule per pulse from a reliable and robust portable laser system with high average power. Increasing amplifier efficiency is a critical need in order to reach high average powers nee ...

We propose to construct a deception detection system which will exploit scaffolding provided by a collection of largely domain-independent deception detection heuristics. These heuristics, integrated through a novel evidential reasoning system, will provide the proposed system, called Skeptic, with a significant advantage over purely inductive methods by allowing it to exploit the adversarial natu ...

Free electron lasers (FEL) made from Nb cavities offer high performance, but they are complex, bulky, and expensive. For Navy FEL applications, where footprint, power consumption, and cost are severely constrained and reliability is of great importance there is a critical need for an alternative to Nb. MgB2 is a recently discovered superconductor with a high critical temperature and critical field ...

A rapid prototyping simulation for the Autonomous Rotorcraft Land & Take-Off (ARLTO) system will be developed to analyze and evolve requirements for the landing and take-off of a Rotary-wing Autonomous Air Vehicle (RAAV) from unprepared terrain. The simulation is based upon the Task-Pilot-Vehicle modeling system and features a UH-60 configured with a Sliding Mode Control (SCM) inner loop closure. ...

TSC and Purdue University will demonstrate a lab prototype of software and hardware capable of doing high speed monitoring of a Lithium-Ion cell. This monitoring needs to be specifically designed to predict failures. When a predictive failure is indicated a defensive countermeasure needs to be implemented. Our specific project goals are to: 1) Select a Lithium-Ion battery that consists of multiple ...

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 ...