PHYSICAL SCIENCES INC. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: SOCOM15-005

Description

"USSOCOM has need for a lightweight, concealable, one-to-three legged support for modern targeting devices. Existing solutions are heavy, bulky, expensive, and take too long both to deploy and to stow when operations are complete. The Physical Sciences team of structural engineers and retired USSOCOM operators will determine the feasibility of using low-cost, commercially available materials to form rapidly deployable tactical structures. The development will include an assessment of the state of the art from a range of fields from ground military to spacecraft. These potential solutions will be compared with a common set of operational constraints to enable an honest comparison followed by a down-selection of the most promising candidates. During the proposed Phase I program, PSI will provide detailed models of potential solutions and then use experimental characterization to verify these models and predict actual system performance of different options. The verification of performance through prototype testing will provide USSOCOM with an accurate prediction of the behavior of an operational system as well as its cost in production volumes. This work would set the stage for a Phase II development of prototypes for field evaluation as well as application to other challenges."