MIKEL INC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: N192-121
MIKEL INC — SBIR Phase I award from Department of Defense.
Phase I SBIR feasibility signal
- Phase I awards fund proof-of-concept work. For capture teams, they mark early interest from Department of Defense in a technical approach.
- Watch for Phase II follow-ons from the same firm/topic family — that conversion path is where budgets and transition pressure rise.
- Obligated amount $139,999. Cross-check similar awards in the same agency and technology tags for going-rate context.
- Topic code N192-121 links this award to a solicitation family — search the same topic stem for incumbents and recompete timing.
- Amount
- $139,999
- Agency
- Department of Defense · Navy
- Program / Phase
- SBIR · Phase I
- Topic
- N192-121
- Solicitation
- 19.2
- NAICS
- —
- Place of performance
- RI
- Period
- 2019-10-18 → 2020-04-15
Description
The current U.S. Navy heavy-weight torpedo (HWT) is a complex autonomous system that carries out several autonomous phases after being launched from a U.S. Navy asset platform. These phases, as mentioned in the solicitation, are generally search, detect, track, classify, localize, home, and prosecute. Owing largely to the complexities of the underwater acoustic environment, the HWT must operate with an intrinsic information deficit. Such challenges make detection, localization, and classification of slow-moving (low-Doppler) contacts difficult for all unmanned systems. MIKEL has successfully employed advanced beamformers such as the Basis Pursuit De-Noising (BPDN) beamformer to provide highly-resolved localization estimates of sonar contacts. The BPDN is applied in this work to separate closely-spaced, slow-moving, contacts in the context of that found with the HWT. For the HWT and other unmanned systems, the BPDN can provide superior localization performance to improve the classification of low-Doppler contacts.