An organization must reduce the amount of plastic resin used in packaging, while maintaining the package’s structural integrity and functionality through the supply chain. It may be possible, for example, to inject air bubbles into plastic resin in such a way as to maintain container size, shape, and...

The Robonaut is a humanoid robot, so it’s a robot that looks very much like a person. It has two arms, similar degrees of freedom, and some complex dexterous hands. The hands are also very similar to what we have on our arms. The goal is for the Robonaut to be able to...

This innovation is a system for gas sensing that includes an ultra-low-power MEMS (microelectromechanical system) gas sensor, combined with unique electronic circuitry and a proprietary algorithm for operating the sensor. The electronics were created from scratch, and represent a novel design capable of...

In a realistic odorant detection application environment, the collected sensory data is a mix of unknown chemicals with unknown concentrations and noise. The identification of the odorants among these mixtures is a challenge in data recognition. In...

High-resolution submillimeter/terahertz spectroscopy is important for studying atmospheric and interstellar molecular gaseous species. It typically uses heterodyne receivers where an unknown (weak) signal is mixed with a strong signal from the local...

A paper describes a modular design for new controllers for infrared heating during cruise stage solar thermal vacuum test of the Mars Science Laboratory. The controllers had to be easy to use and maintain, used with a wide variety of different control schemes, and made using commercial...

A document describes a suite that provides four simultaneous ion and neutral-atom measurements as a function of altitude, with variable sensitivity for neutral atmospheric species. The variable sensitivity makes it possible to extend the measurements over the...

A method has been developed to screen commercial electrochemical oxygen sensors to reduce the failure rate. There are three aspects to the method: First, the sensitivity over time (several days) can be measured and the rate of change of the sensitivity can be used to predict...

A sub-aperture stitching optical interferometer can provide a cost-effective solution for an in situ metrology tool for large optics; however, the currently available technologies are not suitable for high-speed and real-time...

The current generation of submillimeter- wave instruments is relatively massand power-hungry. The receiver front ends (RFEs) of a submillimeter instrument form the heart of the instrument, and any mass reduction achieved in this subsystem is propagated through the instrument. In the...

It was not known how to assess accurately losses in a communications link due to photodetector blocking, a phenomenon wherein a detector is rendered inactive for a short time after the detection of a photon. When used to detect a communications signal, blocking leads to losses relative to an ideal detector,...

A polymorphic systolic array framework has been developed that works in conjunction with an embedded microprocessor on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), which allows for dynamic and complimentary scaling of acceleration levels of two algorithms active concurrently on the FPGA. Use is made...