Award Data

Higher efficiency solar cells are needed to reduce solar array mass, volume, and cost for Air Force space missions. Intermediate-band quantum-dot (QD) solar cells can yield dramatically higher efficiencies than current multi-junction (MJ) technologies. However, several issues must be addressed to demonstrate manufacturable, high efficiency devices. CFDRC aims to develop: 1) High-efficiency, ligh ...

The objective of this Phase I project is to evaluate the use of novel Laser Induced Surface Improvement (LISI) techniques to provide surface modification to substrate materials which will provide superior wear resistance in extreme conditions. The specific application of interest is the hypersonic metal-to-metal contact that occurs at high speed test track facilities that can and has lead to catas ...

The design of future hypersonic vehicles requires detailed understanding of flow regimes ranging from rarefied to continuum. Hypervelocity flows are characterized by high temperatures, real gas effects, nonequilibrium chemistry, and ionization. The goal of this project is to develop unified kinetic/continuum solution methods with automatic domain decomposition for a wide range of Air Force applic ...

The Army has a clear need for a small unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) capable of autonomously accompanying a single soldier or vehicle. Such a UGV would help solve both logistical problems of soldiers needing to transport more equipment and supplies than they can carry in a backpack, and tactical problems of scouting unsafe areas. Multiple designs for such UGVs exist; however, they require active re ...

Future naval operations are expected to make extensive use of unmanned vehicles to support a range of operations, including intelligence gathering, mine warfare, force protection, and anti-submarine warfare. Current unmanned systems are typically controlled remotely by an operator who directly manipulates a control interface for the vehicle. The effectiveness of this approach is obviously limited ...

The proposed Automated Linguistic Analysis Revealing Misrepresentation and Messaging (ALARMM) system significantly advances the state of the art in detecting deception in unstructured data such as Web sites and chat messages. Our research focuses on automated techniques based on linguistic theory that can detect both misrepresentations and hidden messages. The proposed work draws on the field of s ...

The dependability, persistence, and versatility of unmanned systems have made them indispensable assets in today’s warfighting. As they are tasked to fulfill new missions in unpredictable, dynamic environments, they are transitioning from remote control into the realm of autonomy. Here they perform rapid and semi-autonomous behaviors, such as re-planning and re-tasking, to accomplish mission obj ...

We propose to develop and evaluate generalizable techniques for Enabling Representation of Meta-Information in Net-Centric Environments (ERMINE). The proposed ERMINE effort represents a fundamental contribution to research in meta-information portrayal that will generalize across domains. Under Phase I, we demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed approach to developing and evaluating meta-info ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer research project addresses the perception and learning of complex sound patterns within complex auditory scenes. The objective is to model auditory signal processing, pattern recognition and learning in the human auditory system. Our novel approach simulates the nonlinear signal processing that has been observed in auditory physiology. By mimicking functiona ...

deciBel Research and our university partner, Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT)-Center for Imaging Science, propose to develop a dual MWIR/LWIR imaging polarimeter for the detection and discrimination of aerosolized biological spores. The system will exploit spectral absorption and MIE scattering-induced radiometric and polarimetric phenomenon exhibited by clouds of aerosolized biological spo ...