Award Data

Special Operations Forces (SOF) are an integral aspect of the US military. SOF operators are among the most elite and highly qualified individuals in the U.S. military. As such, extraordinary physical and mental demands are placed upon them to excel in extreme environments for extended periods of time. This unrelenting cycle of combat deployments and intense pre-deployment training shortens the fu ...

Face recognition performance using deep learning has seen dramatic improvements in recent years. This improvement has been fueled in part by the curation of large labeled training datasets with millions of images of hundreds of thousands of subjects.This results in effective generalization for matching over pose, illumination, expression and age variation, however these datasets have traditionally ...

The safety and operational success of the U.S. Navy (USN) depends on expert navigation, seamanship, and shiphandling skills. Tragically, the Navy experienced four major incidents in 2017. The resulting USN Comprehensive Review identified lapses in basic seamanship and safe navigation skills as contributing factors, reinforcing the critical need for rigorous shiphandling training and proficiency as ...

The Shallow Water and Surf Zone Minehunting program (MAD SWARM) is described that spans the development and demonstration of swarming micro-air vehicles (MAV’s) equipped with Magnetic Anomaly Detectors (MAD’s) to autonomously detect and locate mine targets in shallow water and the surf zone. The MAD Swarm system incorporates low cost micro-air vehicle (MAV) technology, swarming sensor search/c ...

Magnetic materials with high hesitivity values are needed to achieve low-profile conformal broadband magnetodielectric antennas with significantly enhanced efficiency in HF-UHF. The higher the hesitivity, the higher the attainable efficiency in these magnetodielectric antennas. State of the art hesitivity as high as 6×10^6 O/m has been reported in CoZrNb alloy films. Further hesitivity improvemen ...

The Navy is continually developing new technologies to improve warfighting effectiveness. These technologies risk overloading Aircrews cognitive capacities, degrading performance. To mitigate that risk, the Navy needs a system to assess Aircrews physical and cognitive workloads unobtrusively and objectively. To meet these requirements, Charles River Analytics conducted a Phase I effort to design a ...

The introduction of new systems and technologies is critical for maintaining superiority, yet this brings with it uncertainty regarding the impact on users, teams, and organizations. Rigorous test and evaluation (T&E) practices are essential prior to acquiring and instituting new technologies, particularly to objectively assess the workload imposed on end users. Aptima, Inc. and its partners – S ...

To provide power for unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), we propose developing solar cells made using perovskite halide solar absorbers, such as those based upon methylammonium lead iodide (CH3NH3PbI3). Our phase I efforts produced flexible solar cells that exhibited power conversion efficiencies (PCE) of 8.1%, a landmark achievement. The proposed research details how to achieve 20% power conversion ...

Phase I work will combine computer modeling and lab experiments to demonstrate feasibility of a hand-held marker / designator that can generate laser emission at 1064 nm, a wavelength in the 3000 to 4200 nm range, and at a wavelength in the 4400 to 5400 nm range.By improving laser beam quality by a factor of 4 to 16, we will reduce laser output pulse energy requirements by a factor of 10 to 100 at ...

The prevalence of precision guided munitions has increased dramatically in the previous decades, with estimates showing nearly 90% of munitions will be precision guided by 2020. Of these munitions over 90% are expected to be laser guided. There still exists a challenge in reliably laser designating a target in full daylight conditions. Expanding the current laser designator abilities to these mid- ...