Award Data

Our team proposes to develop, test, and commercialize a Micro Air Vehicle Tether Recovery APparatus (MAVTRAP). This system operates by deploying an instrumented MAV capture device attached via a tether system from a mothership unmanned air vehicle (UAV). The instrumented MAV capture device contains an integrated avionics suite. Our team will determine and control the precise mother ship UAV loi ...

Military applications for the use of directed electromagnetic energy, which include high power microwave (HPM), seek to disrupt electronic systems by exploiting non-linearity in semiconductors. While current mode second breakdown is a thermal non-linearity often exploited, it has been demonstrated that a broad class of semiconductors have more subtle non-linearities that can be utilized to induce ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer research project addresses the perception and learning of complex sound patterns within complex auditory scenes. The objective is to model auditory signal processing, pattern recognition and learning in the human auditory system. Our novel approach simulates the nonlinear signal processing that has been observed in auditory physiology. By mimicking functiona ...

Prime Research and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte propose to devevelop space-variant nano-optical elements to integrate passive spectral and polarization filters directly into infrared focal plane arrays. This novel technology will enable multi-mode detection by allowing pixels to be uniquely tuned for wavelength and polarization across a focal plane array using a simple fabricatio ...

Graphene has become one of the most promising new materials to form semiconductor devices and microelectronic interconnects. NexGenSemi Corporation in collaboration with Sandia National Labs will develop a “Patterned Graphene Interconnect (PGI) and material modification for nanofabrication of transistor devices. This process resolution will dip deep down into the state-of-the-art technology no ...

Based on our success in developing the world first commercial 100 micro Joule

The real-time implementation of controls in nonlinear systems remains one of the great challenges in applying advanced control technology. Often, linearization around a set point is the only practical approach, and many controllers implemented in hardware systems are simple PID feedback mechanisms. To apply Pontryagin’s principle or Bellman’s equation using conventional hardware and algorith ...

The growing complexity of future military systems demands the development of high-performance nonlinear control algorithms. The goal of this proposal is to develop a specially designed software/hardware architecture to enable real-time autonomous closed-loop control of nonlinear high-dimensional dynamical systems. Following the recent success of pseudospectral (PS) computational control methods in ...

The key to making quantum key distribution practical (especially for free-space applications) is to be able to use weak laser pulses (WLP) instead of single photons, while at the same time making sure that any third party wanting to avoid detection and mount an eavesdropping attack is restricted to using beam-splitting rather than photon-number splitting (PNS). In this effort, we propose a novel s ...

The proposed effort develops the understanding required to assess the utility of using OAM states and quantum entanglement as a novel protocol for quantum key distribution for propagation through an aberrating medium such as the atmosphere. In addition a conceptual design of an experiment that is appropriate to further the development of this capability will be developed on the proposed Phase I e ...