The National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences awarded a $126,139 Project Grant to the University of Virginia to advance research on measuring atmospheric turbulence and wind behavior using commercial off-the-shelf multi-rotor drone technology. The 12-month project, which runs from July 15, 2023 to June 30, 2024, aims to investigate the accuracy of drone-based turbulence measurements and how accuracy varies with drone size and weight. The work will be...
This National Science Foundation (NSF) award under the Engineering program (CFDA 47.041) will fund research to advance the capabilities of aerial robots by enabling manipulation and transportation of flexible objects such as cables, rods, hoses, and plastic sheets. The 5-year, $300,664 project aims to develop a novel control framework that integrates adaptive control and reinforcement learning to ensure stability and enable optimization of aerial manipulation strategies over time. The research...
The National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Information and Intelligent Systems awarded a $400,000 Project Grant to The Trustees of Princeton University, Office of Research and Project Administration, under the NSF Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CFDA 47.070) program. This 3-year grant supports collaborative research on developing theories and algorithms for scalable multi-agent planning and control to enable safe and robust autonomous electrical vertical take-off and...
This $229,309 National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CFDA 47.070) Project Grant, awarded to North Carolina State University, will develop new computational algorithms and systems to enable autonomous unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), or drones, to dynamically adjust their performance and resource allocation in response to changing environmental conditions and mission requirements. The project will create a "co-regulation" framework, including...
This National Science Foundation Project Grant of $500,000 awarded on September 1, 2022 will fund research at the University of Louisville to develop autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles for remote sensing applications in the Arctic through August 31, 2025. The research seeks to advance capabilities under the NSF's Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships program (CFDA 47.084) by designing flight control methods enabling UAV operation in challenging Arctic wind conditions and autonomous data...
This $174,660 National Science Foundation project grant supports research at the Rochester Institute of Technology to develop full automation capabilities for bird-sized unmanned aerial vehicles operating in unknown, cluttered indoor environments using only an RGB-D camera for visual perception. Funded under the NSF's Computer and Information Science and Engineering program (CFDA 47.070), which supports investigator-initiated research and education across computing and information sciences, this...
This EAGER (Early-concept Grants for Exploratory Research) project grant, awarded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation under CFDA Program 47.041 (Engineering), will provide $300,000 to the University of Illinois to conduct research on enabling quadrotor robots to safely interact with and assist humans through customized, user-taught functionalities. The research effort aims to develop a framework that allows anyone to safely...
The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a $300,000 Project Grant under the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CFDA 47.070) program to North Carolina State University (NC State) to study the integration of aerial network elements (ANEs) such as drones and unmanned aerial vehicles into existing terrestrial wireless networks. The 3-year project, titled "NETS: SMALL: COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: NSF-NSERC: 3D HARMONY: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ENABLED HARMONIOUS WIRELESS...
This $274,354 National Science Foundation project grant funds research at the University of Nevada, Reno to develop techniques for improving the resilience of vision-guided unmanned aerial vehicles and other autonomous systems against cyberattacks. The grant is part of the NSF's Engineering program (CFDA 47.041), which supports innovation and excellence in engineering research. Specifically, the research aims to advance an observability analysis framework for detecting and responding to stealthy...
This National Science Foundation (NSF) Project Grant under CFDA program 47.041 "Engineering" provides $251,622 to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to investigate the aerodynamics and aero-structural dynamics of individual feathers and flapping wings with feathered wing-inspired models. The key research objectives are to: (1) study the aerodynamics and aero-structural properties of individual feathers, (2) explore the interactional flow effects in multi-feather...