DARPA projects for 2010

DARPA project solicitations for 2010


SB101-001 Development of Robust, Effective, Inexpensive, Flexible Water and Oxygen Barriers for Flexible Organic Light-Emitting Diodes (FOLEDs)
SB101-002 Enabling Effective Intelligent Tutoring Systems by Sensing Affect
SB101-003 Therapeutic Hypothermia for Treating Traumatic Brain Injury
SB101-004 High Performance Imaging for Small UAV Applications
SB101-005 Tools for the Analysis of Social and Group Dynamics
SB101-006 Adaptive Data Visualization Under Cognitive and Communications Bandwidth Limitations
SB101-007 Experience-Based Advisory Systems for Ground Operations
SB101-008 High-Power High-Linearity High-Speed Photodetection Modules
SB101-009 Miniature UV Sources for Imaging Applications
SB101-010 Non-Condensing Anti-Fog Hydrophobic Optical Coating
SB101-011 Simplified Interface for Navigation Devices for Addition of Aiding Sensors
SB101-012 Revolutionary Electric Propulsion
SB101-013 High Density Power Converter Electronics
SB101-014 Passivation of Laser Diode Micro Channel Coolers

1. Darpa is looking for research projects that would create a “therapeutic hypothermia device” to prevent traumatic brain injuries from causing permanent molecular damage to the brain. The idea is based on successful studies that used cortical cooling to treat survivors of strokes and cardiac arrest. According to Darpa’s solicitation, cooling down the brain after trauma can offer “dramatic neuroprotection” that will prevent long-term harm to cognition and motor skills.

2. Develop a system that assesses and uses a student’s affective state to improve the effectiveness of Intelligent Tutoring Systems.

One way to improve the overall effectiveness of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) is to enable them to characterize student affect and craft instructional content and delivery based on this assessment. Significant research has been done linking facial expressions to different affective states and to exploit these relationships to guide machine responses accordingly. The goal of this SBIR is to develop a system that significantly expands these findings to characterize student affective state using a much wider range of such behaviors (eg facial expressions, gestures, tonal inflections), to guide an ITS in crafting appropriate instruction based on this assessment. The resulting technology must be platform independent, calibratable to different individuals and transparent to the user.

It is estimated that within the DoD, if these and similar training technologies could reduce the time to deliver specialized skill training to just half of all personnel by 30%, the resulting cost savings would approach $500M/yr. One key to ensuring this reduction in training time is to enable these systems to more effectively tailor instructional content to individual student needs by assessing student affect. Commercially, there is a large training and education sector currently working to provide computer based training tools to the K-12 student demographic

3. Revolutionary Electric Propulsion

Accomplish a Phase I feasibility study for design, manufacture and/or test of highly efficient, light weight and long life electric propulsion (EP) thrusters with high thrust to power while at high specific impulse.

Specific objectives are a thruster specific mass of less than 3 Kg/kW while either demonstrating a thrust to power ratio of over 100:1 at a specific impulse of over 1,000 sec, or over 40:1 at 4,000 sec. For all approaches, the ability to throttle the thruster is highly desirable with performance interpolated between these extremes. The minimum lifetime of the proposed electric thruster shall be at least 20,000 hours with a goal of exceeding 50,000 hours at nominal operating conditions. It bears emphasizing that these are minimum goals and special consideration will be given to revolutionary concepts able to significantly exceed these goals

4. Development of Robust, Effective, Inexpensive, Flexible Water and Oxygen Barriers for Flexible Organic Light-Emitting Diodes (FOLEDs)

The ultimate target for barrier performance is a water transmission rate of 1 x 10^-6 g/m2/day which can survive a 5% film strain.

Potential Commercial Applications: flexible displays, packaging for meals ready to eat and medical supplies.

One of the primary considerations in developing this technology will be the cost to produce the barrier. A target cost of less than $1/ft^2 for barrier fabrication has been set by the display industry .This goal is not feasible with conventional ALD batch processing. Higher throughput – for example roll-to-roll – ALD deposition technology needs to be developed to significantly reduce the cost of barrier fabrication

FURTHER READING
Other Department of Defence solicitations