Award Data

The U.S. Navy seeks methods to improve the fuel economy of marine diesel engines through utilization of waste heat. Low temperature engine jacket water, lubrication oil, and aftercooler air are largely untapped streams of thermal energy on these ships, but their utilization circumvents many operation challenges associated with exhaust gases. For example, variable and high exhaust gas temperatures ...

This proposal describes the use of machine learning, data mining and Bayesian inference algorithms for incorporation into a surveillance aircraft cognitive radar system. The need for incorporation of higher-order uncertainty distributions will also be assessed. This will result in enhanced sensor resource management capability for surveillance aircraft radar.

Quantum cascade laser optical output power is limited by laser facet catastrophic optical damage (COD). In edge-emitting semiconductor lasers COD is a thermal runaway process wherein the front facet of the laser heats under high power operation. This facet heating reduces the semiconductor bandgap which increases the optical absorption and also increases the electrical injection current in the fac ...

In this program, we will develop solutions to optimize QCL fabrication processes, such as facet passivation and high thermal conductivity coatings, that will mitigate the reliability issues for high power QCL applications. In phase I, we will first evaluate all concepts and efforts that have been largely investigated for GaAs based high power diode lasers and transfer the knowledge to InP based QC ...

The development of a catastrophic optical damage model for quantum cascade lasers describing instantaneous laser damage at high optical power levels is proposed. The model will be validated by comparison to experimental data. Based on obtained results, changes to laser design and laser fabrication resulting in an increased damage threshold will be implemented. The work will ultimately result into ...

Toyon Research Corp. and the University of California propose to develop innovative algorithms to perform automatic target recognition (ATR), localization, and classification of maritime and land targets in EO/IR, LiDAR, and SAR imagery. The proposed algorithms are based on recent developments made at the University of California, which outline a strong mathematical framework for naturally blendin ...

SSCI and MIT (Prof. Julie Shah) propose to develop and test a system that provides real-time assurance and trust in decisions made by autonomous collaborating vehicles. The proposed system is referred to as the RESTORE and represents a decision support tool which facilitates decision making by the operator in cases when decisions by the Collaborative Autonomy (CA) system results in deviations from ...

Most standard-of-care tools and techniques for evaluating neck disorders are subjective, unreliable, and do not provide actionable information for providers, payers, and organizations to deliver efficient and effective care. This lack of objective neck he

Current cervical spine assessment methodologies are focused on subjective measures (i.e. pain reports) and range-of-motion (ROM) measures that only measure maximum head excursion and reach, but not dynamic motion. Due to report bias and existing incentive

We propose to develop an innovative open architecture for the semi-autonomous command and control (C2) of teaming Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS). The proposed architecture, based upon Toyon’s Decentralized Asset Management system, supports both centralized and decentralized fusion and control autonomy solutions as well as hybrids approaches. Leveraging STANAG-4586, TCP/IP, UPD, Google™ protob ...