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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 109 records · Page 6
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2025

Tactical Analysis for Calculating Contextual Risk at Boundaries: Summary of Laboratory Directed Research & Development Effort

The Tactical Analysis for Calculating Contextual Risk at Boundaries (TACCRAB) tool is an innovative digital twin (DT) platform and automated risk algorithm designed to transform operational decision-making in structured screening environments, with an initial focus on Southern Border Land Ports of Entry (POEs). The invention provides integration points for advanced artificial intelligence, predictive modeling, and real-time data analysis to produce a comprehensive risk management tool that enables proactive, data-informed security strategies. The core inventive features of TACCRAB center on its unique risk algorithm, which dynamically calculates contextual risk by synthesizing historical data, near real-time streaming data from the checkpoints themselves, and AI-generated predictions. Unlike traditional risk assessment methods, TACCRAB utilizes a DT to provide comprehensive operational insights, allowing stakeholders to visualize, simulate, and optimize checkpoint configurations with unprecedented speed and contextual awareness. TACCRAB's key innovation lies in its ability to combine multiple complex inputs - including technology detection probabilities, resource availability, screening pathway characteristics, and threat actor behavioral patterns - into a unified risk calculation and update these inputs based on changing operational and environmental conditions. By leveraging a DT that continuously updates and learns from linked data, TACCRAB can suggest adaptive mitigation strategies that minimize risk while maintaining operational efficiency. Particularly novel is the platform's approach to decision support, which goes beyond static risk assessment. The DT provides dynamic metrics such as wait times, resource allocation effectiveness, and potential emerging threat scenarios, enabling users to view sophisticated, relevant what-if simulations and optimize checkpoint operations in near real-time. The system's architecture allows for generalized application across different screening environments, such as secure facilities, ports of entry, and soft targets, making it a versatile tool for security and operational management. The invention distinguishes itself through its comprehensive integration of predictive modeling, AI-driven pattern discovery, and user-friendly interface design. By combining these elements, TACCRAB transforms complex risk data into actionable insights, supporting decision-makers at various organizational levels - from booth agents making split-second screening decisions to checkpoint managers optimizing the day's resource allocation to strategic planners managing long-term investments.

45 MILITARY TECHNOLOGY, WEAPONRY, AND NATIONAL DEF↗
DOE OSTI2025

Deploying Adversarial Attacks in Super-Resolution Models

Reliable super-resolution methods are crucial for applications like remote sensing, grid resilience and disaster impact analysis, and standoff biometrics. These methods infuse additional high-frequency information into reconstructions, allowing for better contextualization and image intelligence. However, super-resolution models can also introduce hallucinations or other unseen vulnerabilities that could be exploited by an adversary. This is further compounded by the prominence of deep learning in these models, as models are often blindly applied on out-of-distribution images. In this work, we implement adversarial attacks in common open-source super-resolution models and examine their impact on reconstructions and downstream classification tasks. We find that an adversarially trained super-resolution model can produce high-quality reconstructions that degrade downstream classifications. Moreover, these attacks do not require access to low-resolution imagery or class labels at inference time. These results demonstrate the vulnerability of super-resolution methods to malicious actors and motivates the development of a detector for super-resolution adversarial attacks. Further exploration of adversarial attacks in this domain is required to ensure trustworthiness and robustness of super-resolution models for national security applications.

45 MILITARY TECHNOLOGY, WEAPONRY, AND NATIONAL DEF↗
DOE OSTI2026

Firmware Tampering Detection in Heavy-Duty Vehicles through J1939 CAN Analysis

Modern heavy-duty vehicles rely on complex networks of Electronic Control Units (ECUs) that communicate using the J1939 protocol. While this system makes it easier to update and configure vehicle components, it also opens the door to serious cybersecurity risks if not properly secured. This work investigates the potential for firmware tampering through the J1939 communication protocol, which enables ECU configuration and reprogramming over the Controller Area Network (CAN) bus. By monitoring CAN traffic during legitimate maintenance operations and reverse-engineering OEM diagnostic software, we identified common and proprietary J1939 message identifiers, authentication patterns, and vulnerabilities within Unified Diagnostic Services (UDS). These findings demonstrate that inadequate authentication mechanisms can allow malicious actors to alter ECU firmware or disable safety functions, posing severe operational and safety risks. Our analysis contributes to the development of vehicle intrusion detection systems capable of recognizing abnormal reprogramming activity and future firmware fingerprinting methods to verify software integrity across ECUs. This work highlights the importance of standardizing secure firmware authentication across manufacturers to strengthen cyber resilience in heavy-duty vehicle systems.

33 ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS↗
DOE OSTI2026

Watching for light: An enterprise roadmap for trustworthy laser threat warning (LTW) to protect national assets

Comprehensive space force protection must include effective and trustworthy laser threat warning (LTW). Effective LTW will detect and characterize threats to space assets and thus enhance space deterrence. LTW must be trustworthy: able to categorize threats and non-threats by being both sensitive to true events and resistant to false alarms. Outside of the laboratory, the statistics and even the roles of lasers become unclear. In the chain of events leading to an attack, the laser may be the last link to be understood. Human situational awareness and informal reasoning must blend statistics with circumstantial evidence to visualize these chains before they are clear. This paper sets out an industrial model for an enterprise that will routinely produce trustworthy LTW. By incorporating psychology and economics, this enterprise can overcome the difficulties and perils of cooperation in networked defense and intelligence. This roadmap suggests how the enterprise can incentivize distracted actors with different goals to share what they know and coordinate what they do.

45 MILITARY TECHNOLOGY, WEAPONRY, AND NATIONAL DEF↗
DOE OSTI2026

Toward Trustworthy Autonomous Science: A Two-Year Community Roadmap

One year ago, the AISLE roadmap argued that autonomous laboratories operated as isolated islands and proposed a grassroots network organized around five critical dimensions. The field has since moved faster than that roadmap anticipated: multi-agent systems have produced experimentally validated hypotheses, self-driving laboratories have grown more interoperable and orchestrated, reasoning-trained and domain foundation models have raised the capability ceiling, and the Genesis Mission has placed autonomous experimentation at the center of U.S. federal science strategy, with industry emerging as a primary actor. Progress has met a sobering counter-current, including a corrected flagship discovery result, benchmarks showing that agents which rival experts on closed-ended questions still complete only a fraction of open-ended research, and fabricated citations surfacing at leading venues. We read this as the defining tension of the field: producing a candidate discovery is no longer the hard part, but verifying it is, and this asymmetry now limits autonomous science more than raw model capability. Accordingly, we update the roadmap around seven dimensions, revisiting the original five and elevating two former cross-cutting concerns, trust, verification, and reproducibility, and safety, security, and governance, to first-class status. We assess the original milestones (M1 through M14) as achieved, partially achieved, reframed, or open, add four new milestones (M15 through M18) for the elevated dimensions, and scope the path forward to a two-year horizon, with the first year concentrating on interfaces, protocol adoption, and the scaffolding of verification, and the second targeting federation, zero-trust coordination, and governance. Throughout, we position the grassroots network as the interoperability fabric that lets national programs, international initiatives, and commercial platforms connect rather than re-silo.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗
DOE OSTI2026

Stakeholder engagement to address agribusiness concerns and opportunities: the circular carbon bioeconomy example

Effective stakeholder engagement in decisions about complex systems involving sustainable agribusiness requires substantial time and resources by both the managers involved in a supply chain and their stakeholders. Therefore, it is important to understand how to design and implement business strategies that integrate stakeholder perspectives as the project develops. The objective of this article is to explore how actors interested in sustainable and resilient agribusinesses can effectively involve stakeholders in supporting strategies to advance a circular carbon bioeconomy. We consider an approach for stakeholder engagement based on six principles: diversity, listening, value, trust, accountability, and flexibility/ adaptability. Practical means for agribusinesses to apply the six principles to the circular carbon bioeconomy are discussed along with challenges encountered when applying them. Managerial choices and engagement designs and practices are specific to each type of agribusiness. Employing this approach can help project developers prioritize, prepare, and sustain stakeholder engagement, and build local capacities for continual improvement and informed decisions aligned with more sustainable business strategies.

Dale, Virginia [University of Tennessee, Knoxville↗
DOE OSTI2026

Opportunities in AI/ML for the Rubin LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will produce unprecedented volumes of heterogeneous astronomical data (images, catalogs, and alerts) that challenge traditional analysis pipelines. The LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration (DESC) aims to derive robust constraints on dark energy and dark matter from these data, requiring methods that are statistically powerful, scalable, and operationally reliable. Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) are already embedded across DESC science workflows, from photometric redshifts and transient classification to weak lensing inference and cosmological simulations. Yet their utility for precision cosmology hinges on trustworthy uncertainty quantification, robustness to covariate shift and model misspecification, and reproducible integration within scientific pipelines. This white paper surveys the current landscape of AI/ML across DESC's primary cosmological probes and cross-cutting analyses, revealing that the same core methodologies and fundamental challenges recur across disparate science cases. Since progress on these cross-cutting challenges would benefit multiple probes simultaneously, we identify key methodological research priorities, including Bayesian inference at scale, physics-informed methods, validation frameworks, and active learning for discovery. With an eye on emerging techniques, we also explore the potential of the latest foundation model methodologies and LLM-driven agentic AI systems to reshape DESC workflows, provided their deployment is coupled with rigorous evaluation and governance. Finally, we discuss critical software, computing, data infrastructure, and human capital requirements for the successful deployment of these new methodologies, and consider associated risks and opportunities for broader coordination with external actors.

Aubourg, Eric [APC, Paris] (ORCID:000000025592023X↗
NASA NTRS1983

Planning in time - Windows and durations for activities and goals

The present general purpose automated planner/scheduler generates parallel plans aimed at the achievement of goals having imposed time constraints, with both durations and start time windows being specifiable for sets of goal conditions. Deterministic durations of such parallel plan activities as actions, events triggered by circumstances, inferences, and scheduled events entirely outside the actor's control, are explicitly modeled and may be any computable function of the activity variables. The final plan network resembles a PERT chart. Examples are given from the traditional 'blocksworld', and from a realistic 'Spaceworld' in which an autonomous spacecraft photographs objects in deep space and transmits the information to earth.

Vere, S. A.↗
NASA NTRS1986

Using Ada to implement the operations management system in a community of experts

An architecture is described for the Space Station Operations Management System (OMS), consisting of a distributed expert system framework implemented in Ada. The motivation for such a scheme is based on the desire to integrate the very diverse elements of the OMS while taking maximum advantage of knowledge based systems technology. Part of the foundation of an Ada based distributed expert system was accomplished in the form of a proof of concept prototype for the KNOMES project (Knowledge-based Maintenance Expert System). This prototype successfully used concurrently active experts to accomplish monitoring and diagnosis for the Remote Manipulator System. The basic concept of this software architecture is named ACTORS for Ada Cognitive Task ORganization Scheme. It is when one considers the overall problem of integrating all of the OMS elements into a cooperative system that the AI solution stands out. By utilizing a distributed knowledge based system as the framework for OMS, it is possible to integrate those components which need to share information in an intelligent manner.

Frank, M. S.↗
NASA NTRS1989

Theft of information in the take-grant protection model

Using the information transfer extensions to the Take-Grant Protection Model, the concept of theft of information is defined and necessary and sufficient conditions for such theft to occur are presented, as well as bounds on the number of actors involved in such theft. Finally, the application of these results to reference monitors are explored.

Bishop, Matt↗
NASA NTRS1992

Needs for supervised space robots in space exploration

The areas of application for space robots in the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI) are examined by reviewing the roles of SEI supervised robots particularly with planet-surface systems (PSSs). Treatment is given to both teleoperated conventional robot systems and autonomous intelligent systems for comparison in terms of safety, reliability, and productivity. Two development stages are proposed including one with a robotic actor, human observer, and a human supervisor and a second in which a closed-loop control and monitoring system is established. The use of remote control is shown to require robustness, self-calibration and -diagnosis, adjustable autonomy, and multitask capability. The requirements of intelligent control are also listed so that the PSSs of the SEI can be used to enable surface exploration, local-resource utilization potential, and reductions of human tasks.

Erickson, Jon D.↗
NASA NTRS1992

Advanced software development workstation. OOPSLA 1992 Conference. Trip report

This report summarizes the main trends observed at the Object Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications Conference held in Vancouver, British Columbia. This conference is the main object-oriented event that allows us to assess the dynamism of the technology and to meet the main actors of the field. It is an invaluable source of information for the advanced software development project.

Izygon, Michel E.↗
NASA NTRS1993

An artificial reality environment for remote factory control and monitoring

Work has begun on the merger of two well known systems, VEOS (HITLab) and CLIPS (NASA). In the recent past, the University of Massachusetts Lowell developed a parallel version of NASA CLIPS, called P-CLIPS. This modification allows users to create smaller expert systems which are able to communicate with each other to jointly solve problems. With the merger of a VEOS message system, PCLIPS-V can now act as a group of entities working within VEOS. To display the 3D virtual world we have been using a graphics package called HOOPS, from Ithaca Software. The artificial reality environment we have set up contains actors and objects as found in our Lincoln Logs Factory of the Future project. The environment allows us to view and control the objects within the virtual world. All communication between the separate CLIPS expert systems is done through VEOS. A graphical renderer generates camera views on X-Windows devices; Head Mounted Devices are not required. This allows more people to make use of this technology. We are experimenting with different types of virtual vehicles to give the user a sense that he or she is actually moving around inside the factory looking ahead through windows and virtual monitors.

Kosta, Charles Paul↗
NASA NTRS1994

Motion of the heliospheric termination shock. 2: Energy loss due to energetic particle acceleration

We present a generalization of earlier analysis of the motion of the heliospheric termination shock in response to heliospheric disturbances (Barnes, 1993) (paper 1), to allow jump conditions that include an energy sink at the shock front. The motivation for this study is that acceleration of the anomalous cosmic ray component may in fact represent such a sink. We have idealized the situation by assuming an infinitely thin shock parameterized by a quantity lambda(0 less than or equals lambda less than or equals 1), defined as the fraction of solar wind energy that is lost due to acceleration of the energetic particle component. If the sink is strong (consuming, say, 50% or more of the incident solar wind energy), the model leads to the following principal conclusions: (1) the shocked plasma would be much denser and cooler than in the standard gasdynamic case, thereby leading to more favorable conditions for direct observation of the shocked plasma; (2) the equilibrium shock position would be slightly farther (less than 10%) from the Sun than in the standard model; (3) as in the gasdynamic case, the shock would normally be in motion, so that the instantaneous position of the termination shock is not determined by interstellar conditions but by the recent history of the wind that has passed through the termination shock; and (4) the response of the shock to upstream disturbances would be similar to the response in the gasdynamic case, but the speed of the new termination shock would be somewhat smaller (probably by a f actor of 4 or less). We estimate that this speed is typically, approximately a few tens of kilometers per second corresponding to an inward or outward excursion of order of less than 1 to several AU, rather less than conventional estimates of several tens of AU.

Barnes, Aaron↗
NASA NTRS1995

Synthesis Of Realistic Animations Of A Person Speaking

Actors computer program implements automated process that synthesizes realistic animations of person speaking. Produces "newscaster" type video sequences. Uses images of person and, therefore, not limited to cartoons and cartoonlike movies. Potential applications also include use of process for automatically producing on-the-fly animations for human/computer interfaces and for reducing bandwidth needed to transmit video telephone signals.

Scott, Kenneth C.↗
NASA NTRS1991

STS-44 Mission Highlights Resource Tape. Part 1 of 2

The STS-44 mission is highlighted in this first part of a two part video set. The flight crew consisted of: Cmdr. Fred Gregory; Pilot Tom Hendricks; Payload Specialist Tom Hennen; and Mission Specialists Story Musgrave, Jim Voss, and Mario Runco. The primary space shuttle mission objective was the deployment of the Defense Support Program (DSP) satellite. Secondary payload and spaceborne experiments consisted of a microbial air sampler, the Terra Scout PADVOS system, an M88-1 camera demonstration, a lower body negative pressure test, the Visual Function Tester, and a bioreactor demonstration. A tour of the flight deck, mid-deck, bathroom, and flight compartments with explanations of the equipment found in each area was conducted, a trash compactor was demonstrated, and footage of the crew together for their Thanksgiving dinner was shown. Earth views include several oceans, cloud cover, typhoon Yuri, northeast Australia, and the Barrier Reef Islands. The actor John Patrick Stewart (Commander Pickard of the show 'Star Trek: The Next Generation') performed the wake-up call for the astronauts. This flight was shortened due to an inertial measurement unit failure on the sixth day of the mission.

Source record↗
NASA NTRS1990

Building distributed rule-based systems using the AI Bus

The AI Bus software architecture was designed to support the construction of large-scale, production-quality applications in areas of high technology flux, running heterogeneous distributed environments, utilizing a mix of knowledge-based and conventional components. These goals led to its current development as a layered, object-oriented library for cooperative systems. This paper describes the concepts and design of the AI Bus and its implementation status as a library of reusable and customizable objects, structured by layers from operating system interfaces up to high-level knowledge-based agents. Each agent is a semi-autonomous process with specialized expertise, and consists of a number of knowledge sources (a knowledge base and inference engine). Inter-agent communication mechanisms are based on blackboards and Actors-style acquaintances. As a conservative first implementation, we used C++ on top of Unix, and wrapped an embedded Clips with methods for the knowledge source class. This involved designing standard protocols for communication and functions which use these protocols in rules. Embedding several CLIPS objects within a single process was an unexpected problem because of global variables, whose solution involved constructing and recompiling a C++ version of CLIPS. We are currently working on a more radical approach to incorporating CLIPS, by separating out its pattern matcher, rule and fact representations and other components as true object oriented modules.

Schultz, Roger D.↗
NASA NTRS1993

Rapid prototyping 3D virtual world interfaces within a virtual factory environment

On-going work into user requirements analysis using CLIPS (NASA/JSC) expert systems as an intelligent event simulator has led to research into three-dimensional (3D) interfaces. Previous work involved CLIPS and two-dimensional (2D) models. Integral to this work was the development of the University of Massachusetts Lowell parallel version of CLIPS, called PCLIPS. This allowed us to create both a Software Bus and a group problem-solving environment for expert systems development. By shifting the PCLIPS paradigm to use the VEOS messaging protocol we have merged VEOS (HlTL/Seattle) and CLIPS into a distributed virtual worlds prototyping environment (VCLIPS). VCLIPS uses the VEOS protocol layer to allow multiple experts to cooperate on a single problem. We have begun to look at the control of a virtual factory. In the virtual factory there are actors and objects as found in our Lincoln Logs Factory of the Future project. In this artificial reality architecture there are three VCLIPS entities in action. One entity is responsible for display and user events in the 3D virtual world. Another is responsible for either simulating the virtual factory or communicating with the real factory. The third is a user interface expert. The interface expert maps user input levels, within the current prototype, to control information for the factory. The interface to the virtual factory is based on a camera paradigm. The graphics subsystem generates camera views of the factory on standard X-Window displays. The camera allows for view control and object control. Control or the factory is accomplished by the user reaching into the camera views to perform object interactions. All communication between the separate CLIPS expert systems is done through VEOS.

Kosta, Charles Paul↗