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 ...

This Navy STTR Phase I proposal presents an parallel AM tool to eliminate conventional scanning strategy. A 2D MEMS array is used to shape both in time domain and spatial domain to obtain the desired pattern for layer by layer process. Modeling is used to study in-process melting evolution versus powder and beam properties. It provides quantitative characterization of the AM system to guide the de ...

Filamentation of ultra-short laser pulse propagation in non-linear media offers significant potentials allowing to address numerous problems in military and commercial sectors. However, practical implementation of this requires an ability to control the USLP at its propagation through inhomogeneous media, like turbulent atmosphere. On the basis of our approach for combating turbulence effects on p ...

We propose a multi-part system to process, understand, and summarize video streams. Our approach involves processing video and audio jointly; uses the latest advances in captioning and automatic speech-recognition to construct text narratives for the video; and uses NLP techniques to summarize and produce a reliable relevance ranking of these videos. We address all six technical challenges identif ...

The goal of this program is to develop and construct a thin, light weight, low power, large aperture, electro-optic (EO) transmissive scanner that utilizes electro-optically active nanomaterial structures, suitable for UAVs platform. The nano-material beam-steering technology aperture system offers an ultra-thin Size, Weight, and Power (SWAP) to fit on UAV;s airframe and achieve ultrafast and wide ...

The proposed project will develop advanced modeling capabilities for high-fidelity liquid-fuel spray calculations. State-of-the-art multiphase combustion models will be implemented in a volume-filtered Eulerian-Lagrangian framework that can easily be ported into existing CFD codes. Unlike traditional methods, the proposed strategy will ensure convergence under mesh refinement of the interphase exc ...

The aerothermal environment for hypersonic flight vehicles is severe and can generate extremely high material temperatures. These high-temperature environments can cause intense localized heating, which may result in local pockets and/or structural instabilities, especially at vehicle leading-edge regions, and may lead to disruptions that affect vehicle performance. The aerothermal environment may ...

BCL proposes developing a Graphical Speech Recognition Tool (GSRT) that will allow Navy Training Operators and Developers to customize Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) Systems to their scenarios within minutes and without the need for external support. In addition, the GSRT System will have a Train the Speaker module that will allow users to familiarize themselves with the ASR System so that the ...

Crew resource management training systems are often constrained by the high cost and lack of flexibility in coordinating a large groups of human role players for part-task training. Motivated by the recent maturation of the speech synthesis and recognition technologies, speech-enabled crew role-player agents are being introduced to address these limitations. However, difficulties remain in customi ...