Award Data

Northwest UAV Propulsion Systems proposes using our purpose built heavy fuel engine designed and built in the USA for small unmanned aerial systems in the tier 2 & 3 class. We will be adding a lightweight ceramic material set combined with FEA (Finite Element Analysis) and heavy fuel atomizer (IRAD Project) to create a lightweight engine for a SUAS or STUAS class UAVs. The Ceramic material set is ...

This Phase I STTR proposal will demonstrate nanostructured “metal-black” coatings to enhance absorption by thin film solar cells. The problem is that silicon has low absorption due to its indirect gap. The opportunity is that nano-scale metallic scattering centers increase the effective optical path length and enhance the solar electric-field strength in thin-film solar cells, leading to more ...

We propose to design, develop, implement, simulate, and demonstrate an autonomous control and sensing system for the safe vertical landing of autonomous aerial cargo delivery system (ACDS). The landing site is expected to be unprepared mountain sides with slopes up to 15 degrees and rough terrain containing rocks and brush. We also plan to reduce the amount of ground equipment required to operate ...

Sensor development researchers and engineers have perpetually sought novel methods to reduce sensor size and improve performance. Continued miniaturization of sensors through micromachining has enabled novel applications and introduced new paradigms for engineered systems to interact with the world. The challenge has always been to improve performance while continually reducing size. In the cur ...

We propose to develop a computational model of leadership designed to capture complex variables including cultural differences in leadership requirements along with task differences, primarily ill-defined goals, which pose leadership challenges. Rather than avoiding these kinds of complexity and developing a computational model that is unlikely to scale up, we believe there is more to be gained b ...

This program will create 40 Gbps VCSEL-based micro-transceiver (uTRX) components that operate reliably over the standard military temperature range of -55°C to 125°C in Army environments. uTRXs are low-cost, compact components that can be assembled into the PCB in close proximity to high-performance ASICs using conventional solder-reflow"pick-and-place"assembly. The small PCB footprint and sol ...

The goal of the Phase I project is to develop a COTS system into a modular unit for detection, tracking and classification of large marine organisms such as manatees and turtles. The Kongsberg Mesotech M3 Sonar is a 500 kHz multibeam that can resolve objects as far as 150 m. This compact system has been tested to detect Florida manatees by Dr. Kevin Boswell and will be used by well qualified marin ...

There may be no more important mission for the US military than protection from ballistic missile attack. For any configuration of sensors, it is therefore extremely important to make the most of the collected sensor data. Specifically, this proposal describes how this objective can be accomplished by using artificial intelligence techniques to implement human-quality reasoning on object feature ...

Phase I objective is to demonstrate the feasibility of our proposed passivation approach to minimize the dark current noise and improve the quantum efficiency in the GaSb based type II superlattice detectors. Phase I goal is to demonstrate the feasibility of our technology to fabricate photodiodes with cut-off wavelength in excess of 10µm, quantum efficiency exceeding 70% and dark current density ...

Antimony containing III-V semiconducting compounds are particularly attractive for the fabrication of a wide variety of electronic and optoelectronic devices such as photo detectors operating in the long wave infrared wavelength (12-32µm) range. The production of epi quality GaSb wafers still remains one of the important problems for rapid commercialization of GaSb devices. Sinmat Inc. proposes a ...