Award Data

This topic addresses the problem of robustly commanding and controlling unmanned ground vehicles operating in complex, unstructured environments. Current approaches to this task rely on dense scene reconstruction from a variety of sensor data such as LIDAR and video imagery. Scene representations are then relayed to a remote human operator who provides commands at varying levels of supervisory con ...

Recent advancements in sensor simulation tools [2] have improved our ability to model radar, lidar, camera, and GPS with software/hardware in the loop. Of course, our ability to model the physics of heavy trucks [3] is quite mature as well. To address the challenge of developing the STE, we will provide our autonomy algorithms as Government Furnished Equipment (GFE). The focus of this topic ...

Human-autonomous system interaction is frequently limited by lack of confidence and trust among the (combined) team. In order to have humans collaborate effectively with autonomous systems, improved interfaces and interaction techniques, and frameworks of interaction must be developed that allow for a common perception of the goals, constraints, resources, and other variables relevant to the team ...

The primary goal of the preceding Phase I program was to demonstrate the feasibility of developing commercially viable products from our technological innovation that enables unprecedentedly high energy efficiency generation of super-intense EUV-x-ray beams via Metastable Innershell Molecular State. We have successfully met the Phase I goal by demonstrating the feasibility, and are now ready for f ...

Toxic air pollutants, also known as hazardous air pollutants (HAPs), are those pollutants that are known or suspected to cause cancer or other serious health effects, such as reproductive effects or birth defects, or adverse environmental effects. In today's environment, there are continuing problems associated with the environmental effects of multiple pollutant gas released to the air. This conc ...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Office of Water (OW) is seeking innovative technologies to improve the performance and reliability of small drinking water systems. In response, Physical Optics Corporation (POC) proposes to develop a novel Regenerative Capacitive Electro-Desalination System (RECED) to enable the use of reduced-quality water sources, such as weakly saline brackish wat ...

Project Summary. Industrial Microbes is developing a green fermentation platform to replace carbon-emitting petrochemical processes with new methods that build chemicals out of carbon dioxide and methane. By using these raw materials and a new process, the company will be able to produce valuable chemicals for half the current production cost. This advantage means that Industrial Microbes’ techn ...

Under a Phase II program, DRS Scientific will build, test, and deliver a new type of Acousto-Optic Tuned Filter (AOTF) hyperspectral imager that is compact, rugged, and inexpensive, has no moving parts, and is fast and sensitive. It will cover 8-12 micron wavelength range with 10 wavenumber spectral resolution or finer, and will have micro-Flick sensitivity with a cooled camera, and

Some of our nations adversaries possess advanced technologies and equipment necessary for the processing and development of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). There is a growing risk that these capabilities and technologies will be used against the United States or our allies. For this reason, an opportunity exists to develop offensive solutions that will enable warfighters to combat WMD at the so ...

Combustion Research and Flow Technology, Inc. (CRAFT Tech) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have teamed up to provide DTRA with an innovative approach to develop new combined effects explosives (CEX) formulations. CEX represent a class of recently-developed aluminized explosives seeking to provide the performance of both (i) high-energy explosives and (ii) high-blast explo ...