This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) program (CFDA 47.070) is for a collaborative research project focused on developing introspective counterfactual reasoning capabilities to enhance the robustness and resilience of autonomous robotic systems. The $275,000 award, effective September 1, 2024, through August 31, 2027, will be led by the University of Illinois. The project aims to bridge the knowledge gap in...
This Project Grant award from the Office of Naval Research (CFDA 12.300 - Basic and Applied Scientific Research) provides $1,969,845.89 to Carnegie Mellon University to conduct research on overcoming unexpected failures in autonomous systems using neurocognitive multi-abstraction active exploration techniques. The research aims to develop bio-inspired methods for enabling autonomous agents to discover new strategies to overcome unexpected challenges, drawing insights from studies of human and...
This federal Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) under the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CFDA 47.070) program provides $375,000 to the University of Massachusetts to conduct research on aligning the norms of autonomous robots with human values. The key activities include: Developing inverse reinforcement learning algorithms to learn reward functions from demonstrations constrained by deontic logic. Systematically exploring the trained agent's...
This five-year National Science Foundation Project Grant of $1,238,246 will fund research at Carnegie Mellon University toward developing safe autonomous systems. The goal is to enable robots and other autonomous systems to operate safely while interacting closely with humans, as required for applications like next-generation manufacturing infrastructure. The university will develop a new algorithmic framework for assuring safety in autonomous robotic systems. The framework aims to optimize...
This $425,000 Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) program (CFDA 47.070) supports research to develop a framework for ensuring the safety of future robotic systems. The research project, led by The Trustees of Princeton University, aims to lay the foundation for safe robot autonomy by enabling robots to continually prove the safety of their actions under a wide range of operating conditions, from complex physical...
This five-year, $1.2 million project grant from the National Science Foundation's Integrative Activities program will fund research into community-embedded robotics through long-term autonomous deployments. The University of Texas at Austin, in partnership with the University of Texas System, will combine expertise in human-robot interaction, human factors, organizational communication, science and technology studies, team science, and research informatics. The project aims to study interactions...
This National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Federal Grant Program (CFDA 47.070) Project Grant award, totaling $639,945, was provided to Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) from June 2024 through May 2027. The research project focuses on developing methods to detect faults in robotic and autonomous systems (RAS) by analyzing program artifacts and real-world data. Key deliverables include: 1) techniques to infer behavior models and check them against...
This Project Grant awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under the Engineering program (CFDA 47.041) will support $361,090 in research to expand the understanding of how robots can make safe decisions in real-world environments. The goal is to develop new methods that enable robots to better assess and respond to nuanced safety challenges, such as avoiding areas marked with caution tape, slowing down when transporting hot liquids, and seeking clarification when uncertain about a task....
This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) under the Integrative Activities program (CFDA 47.083) aims to advance space exploration by improving the performance and resilience of multi-agent robotic systems for harsh environments like the Moon or Mars. The $269,069 award to the University of Vermont will develop data-driven control mechanisms to enhance fault tolerance and adaptive capabilities of distributed robot formations. The project will partner with NASA's Jet...
This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Integrative Activities program (CFDA 47.083) supports research to enable trustworthy, complex, learning-enabled autonomy, with a focus on developing new techniques and tools to formally verify the safety and robustness of deep neural networks before their use in safety-critical applications. The $348,576 award to the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska, effective February 1, 2025 through January 31, 2030, will...