Award Data

Additive manufacturing (AM) is a very promising technique for rapid, low-cost production of aircraft parts directly from a CAD file. AM is especially appealing for complex parts that would be costly or impossible to fabricate by machining or casting. At the current time there are no reliable, cost-effective techniques to qualify the finished parts. Several government studies have noted this gap an ...

A critical aspect of exoskeleton control that has to date introduced a performance limitation is the ability of the exoskeleton to recognize the intent of the operator so it can apply assistance to their desired motion. This intent recognition effort is typically solved using ad-hoc methods where subject matter experts make design decisions and tune transitions to identify intended maneuvers as re ...

Coating materials and coating methods used to protect U.S. military aircraft and weapon systems from corrosion and wear are in need of environmentally benign alternatives in order to keep up with dynamic regulations associated with environment, safety, and occupational health. Thus, the Air Force is supporting research to develop alternatives to the dangerous materials identified on the OSD Emergi ...

SA Photonics is pleased to propose the SOCRATES free space optical communication and sensing system featuring the Photonic Optical Multicast Mast Unit (POMMU). SOCRATES enables 360 degree multicast capability of high bandwidth communication in addition threat search and track capability. SA Photonics will team with the Prof. Michal Lipson of the Lipson Nanophotonics Group at Columbia University wh ...

Current scene projection hardware is challenged to simultaneously meet the requirements for high peak temperature (> 2000K), high resolution (2Kx2K), response time < 4 ms, cryogenic and temporally uniform photon flux. MEMS, Resistor arrays, liquid cr...

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology is in wide use today and has been successfully integrated into a number of applications. Although there are also many potential applications for automatic speaker identification (SID), SID accuracy rates are generally not sufficient for widespread use in practical applications. For high accuracy ASR and SID, the microphone must be located near the talk ...

Increasing system capabilities in terms of weapon systems, ISR payloads, GNC, etc., enabled by smaller and more capable electronics systems have led to a trend for overall size reduction in military aircraft. This has resulted in a reduction in the avail...

Recreational drug use by military personnel can impact soldier preparedness and performance especially in difficult and demanding environments. One challenge for monitoring illicit drug use is that current tests rely on the identification of specific chemical structures. Small variants in the chemistry of a drug can evade detection. In this Phase I SBIR, we will develop a lateral flow test that ...

We propose to investigate, in collaboration with the Massachusetts General Hospital Voice Center and Altec, Inc., the application of surface electromyography (sEMG) to assessing cognitive workload, strain, and overload. Specifically, sEMG sensors placed on the face and neck will detect emotional/motor responses to workload strain. The proposed effort will build on the substantial sEMG experience o ...

Systems that operate in constrained environments depend on the acoustics in several ways. Harbor defense systems detect intruders (peopleand/or vessels) by either listening for their noises (passively) or by pinging on them and detecting their echoes (actively). Furthermore, suchsystems may also form the equivalent of an underwater cell phone network using sound to carry the information. The acous ...