Award Data

A rapid prototyping simulation for the Autonomous Rotorcraft Land & Take-Off (ARLTO) system will be developed to analyze and evolve requirements for the landing and take-off of a Rotary-wing Autonomous Air Vehicle (RAAV) from unprepared terrain. The simulation is based upon the Task-Pilot-Vehicle modeling system and features a UH-60 configured with a Sliding Mode Control (SCM) inner loop closure. ...

The Air Force has a strategic need for a fuel source that is renewable (and which does not rely on foreign petroleum sources). Several approaches to a renewable fuel source have been investigated; with “artificial photosynthesis” being one example. At its core, the photosynthesis reaction is a photoinduced charge separation reaction with light being concentrated by antenna complexes onto a c ...

ABSTRACT: A system that operates at room temperature and that could scan for concealed weapons from standoff distances of >10 m would be a tremendous asset for US military homeland security personnel worldwide. THz imaging can, potentially, be used for this application, but it requires the development of a new class of THz detectors whereby the signal to noise ratios are improved significantly. ...

TSC and Purdue University will demonstrate a lab prototype of software and hardware capable of doing high speed monitoring of a Lithium-Ion cell. This monitoring needs to be specifically designed to predict failures. When a predictive failure is indicated a defensive countermeasure needs to be implemented. Our specific project goals are to: 1) Select a Lithium-Ion battery that consists of multiple ...

We propose to develop a commercial weakly ionized plasma modeling capability based off of Tech-X’s high energy density plasma fluid code TxFluids. The new additions will be able to be used to model hypersonic vehicle physics including shock waves, plasma chemistry and innovative techniques for blackout mitigation and hypersonic vehicle control through the application of electric and/or magnetic ...

The Navy has need of assessing the river environment including bathymetry, flow velocity profile, and navigational obstructions. While improvements in measurement fidelity and reduction in cost have come about by the use of multiple drifters, measurement quality is lost due to convergent drifter trajectories, and cost/risk remains high due to personnel effort required for deployment. An autonomous ...

Toyon Research Corporation and Brown University propose to develop a complete real-time software solution which ingests multi-sensor ISR imagery and produces geo-specific, realistic simulated imagery for flight simulators and training devices. The technical innovations enabling this solution include fully automated 3-d model construction from sequences of ISR video frames, and geo-registration of ...

In response to SBIR topic MDA09-T006, USCI proposes to develop the first medium-level integrated circuit for radiation-tolerant applications. The advanced integrated circuit will be demonstrated based on a novel yet simple design SiC transistor that has the potential to provide a factor of 10X improvement in performance comparison to state-of-the-art. The SiC transistor can be fabricated by a subs ...

Ziva Corporation in collaboration with UCSB will assess the feasibility of developing a directly modulated polarization switching laser based on the Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser (VCSEL) geometry with a 3dB frequency of at least 10 GHz. This will be a major breakthrough in the ability to cost effectively fabricate directly modulated lasers (even in 2-D arrays) with polarization diversity ...

This proposal addresses key open challenges identified during the LAGR program for the practical use of adaptive, vision-based robot navigation in commercial settings. First, the adaptive vision system learns quickly, but forgets as quickly. This will be addressed by using an ensemble of "expert" classifiers, each of which specializes for a particular environment and can be quickly activated when ...