It appears as if this specific research was funded by Black & Decker. If they couldn't get the benefits from it, it's not as if they'd pay JHU to do and make pu

It appears as if this specific research was funded by Black & Decker. If they couldn't get the benefits from it, it's not as if they'd pay JHU to do and make public this research, but rather that they'd do the research a different way, likely robbing the JHU students of the real-world problem-solving experience as a capstone project of their engineering curriculum. How JHU's other, unrelated research is funded doesn't seem terribly relevant to this privately-funded, patent-pending innovation.