Award Data

Ultra-short pulse lasers have advantages over continuous-wave lasers for directed-energy applications due to the high peak powers that can be reached. Directed-energy weapons are profoundly limited by the aberrations caused by atmospheric turbulence and current adaptive optics can correct for these aberrations only when the propagation medium is reciprocal. Unfortunately, nonlinear effects in the ...

Development of a concept of operations is proposed for autonomous hydrothermal vent detection in a single sortie. The concept involves active sonars (forward looking and swath mapping sonars, plus possibly a 1-2 MHz acoustic Doppler current profiler (ADCP) for measuring midwater turbulence) mounted on a commercial AUV equipped with environmental sensors (e.g., CTD, fluorometer, MAPR-ORP). The AUV ...

In this Phase I Project ACTA and its partners will demonstrate the feasibility of developing a risk-based mission path planning (RB MPP) approach. Areas of interest to the Navy where a RB MPP address critical needs include enabling less restrictive UAS operations within the US National and Foreign Airspaces. The Phase I will demonstrate feasibility with a two-step approach. The first step will dem ...

Enabling operators to command and control multiple UAVs will require higher levels of supervisory control, enabling vehicles to operate autonomously during larger portions of each mission. For the foreseeable future, however, critical portions of each mission will require operators to apply their superior knowledge, judgment, and skills to assess the situation, monitor execution more closely and, ...

This STTR Phase II proposal continues our work towards building a simple, high quality and unobtrusive mobile physiological sensor platform. The capabilities of the Phase I prototype will be expanded by adding sensors to further acquire SpO2 and respiration in addition to forming a body area network for data collection across multiple points on a subjects body. A software infrastructure will also ...

This Phase II effort aims to deliver robust, reliable software that instantiates state-of-the-art feedback pseudospectral optimal control algorithms for flight trajectory optimization. The computation and real-time implementation of controls in nonlinear systems remains one of the great challenges for applying optimal control theory in demanding aerospace and industrial systems. From proportional ...

The pseudospectral optimal control (PSOC) problem is used for rapid trajectory optimization and provides the ability to re-optimize during flight. This technology was implemented on a Navy-relevant mission, and pseudo-real-time operation was demonstrated. The technical readiness level at the end of the Phase I program is a concept that has been shown to be feasible using analysis and simulation. T ...

In this Phase II STTR effort, nGimat will partner with the University of Kentucky (UK) and 3M/Ceradyne to continue development of W-scandate cathode composite materials. Compared to conventional M-type cathodes, these composite scandate nanomaterials will enable longer cathode lifetime by lowering the required operating temperature. nGimat is an established and successful powder manufacturing comp ...

Vacuum Process Engineering, Inc. (VPE), in collaboration with the University of California, Davis (UC Davis), proposes to develop and quantitatively verify a large scale production process for scandate tungsten nanocomposite powder to be used in high current density and long life cathodes during the Phase II effort. The plan for implementation of the large scale production process at VPE with powd ...

We are developing a platform for pharmacometric data analysis workflow that is much more flexible and efficient than anything else on the market. This will be accomplished by (1) developing new functions within Stan, a widely used, open-source, probabilistic programming language and Bayesian inference engine, for computationally efficient data analysis using complex differential equation models, ( ...