DESI: Defense Enterprise Science Initiative
Accelerating impact through university-industry partnerships

Power beaming, the wireless transfer of energy, may utilize lasers as an energy source due to its inherent advantages relative to other approaches, such as increased range.  Early demonstrations of power beaming with lasers used conventional solar cells for a fielded system, which is not an ideal choice. This is because solar cells are designed to capture sunlight, which has a broad range of frequencies, but lasers operate at narrow bandwidths, resulting in poor beaming efficiencies. The proposed project will perform the fundamental research necessary to develop and demonstrate laser power converters that take advantage of the narrow bandwidth of lasers and improve the low efficiencies of these systems.

Organisms such as insects, bats, and birds have evolved over millions of years for abilities such as super-maneuverable flight, endurance, and dynamic navigation. All of these qualities present in such organisms are a challenge to replicate in artificial systems. The design of future Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) can greatly benefit from the study and duplication of these capabilities found in nature. Bio-mimetic systems aim to leverage the design approaches found in nature to create artificial and autonomous platforms with similar performance characteristics. Such designs require fundamental advances in multiple technologies, including materials, power, sensors, computing architectures, and artificial intelligence. This project leverages the unique materials and structures found in nature to design and control actual feathers in a morphing bio-hybrid system to achieve super-maneuverability. Besides mechanical design advances, this research will include new developments in autonomous navigation such as flight planning and obstacle avoidance in complex environments.

New materials are the bedrock for a wide range of applications such as robotics, energy storage technologies, and more. In particular, soft materials that can be programmed into specific three dimensional structures and contain built-in functions, such as sensing and dynamic responsiveness to external stimuli, could enable a new generation of these applications. However, new design principles to integrate different materials into one construct are needed to create soft materials with different functions distributed throughout their structure.  This project aims to develop the chemistry and technology necessary to enable the creation of these composite soft materials with independently activated functions and programmable, three-dimensional architectures.  The fundamental understanding provided by this research could lead to transformative breakthroughs in micro-robotics, energy storage, and smart medicine.

Metamaterials are a class of materials that have been engineered to have unique properties not found in nature. Antennas constructed from metamaterials can enhance the abilities of traditional antennas and enable new functions. For instance, metamaterial-based antennas can lead to improved aerodynamic properties, smaller constructs with a wider frequency range, and multiple functions – such as radar and communications – in one device. The proposed project will use analytic and modelling tools to tackle the design challenges of constructing metamaterial-based antennas to enable prototypes that are aerodynamic, conformable, and multi-purpose.

Low earth orbit, approximately 1000 Km above Earth, is an important region of space where many of our surveillance, research (including the international space station), and weather satellites orbit the planet. A significant problem in this region is space junk, made up of defunct satellites and pieces of satellite debris, and estimated to vastly outnumber active satellites at 10,000: 1. Exacerbating this issue is the very small size of most space junk.  Even a small bolt orbiting freely in space can cause tremendous damage if it collides with a satellite. Thus, it is very important to be able to locate space junk of all sizes and prevent collisions with costly active satellites. Traditional ground based radars can and do observe objects in low earth orbit, but small or fast objects can evade detection by these systems.  This project aims to develop a new radar technique capable of providing high resolution radar imagery for objects at low earth orbit, and could lead to a new approach that can detect space objects as small as a bumblebee and at a lower cost than traditional radars.