Project Grant 2549022

The National Science Foundation Division of Information and Intelligent Systems awarded Rutgers, The State University $525,000 on August 1, 2026, under the Computer and Information Science and Engineering program (CFDA 47.070) for infrastructure-based autonomous driving research for micromobility vehicles.

The award funds the SENRIGAN project, a US-Japan collaborative effort to develop infrastructure-integrated autonomous systems for small, lightweight vehicles such as e-scooters, delivery robots, and personal mobility devices used in last-mile transportation. Rather than relying solely on onboard sensors, SENRIGAN offloads perception, prediction, and situational awareness to edge and cloud infrastructure powered by artificial intelligence and next-generation wireless communications. The project addresses three key limitations of vehicle-centric autonomy: the sensor and computational constraints of micromobility platforms, occlusion caused by their low vantage points in dense environments, and the lack of city-scale situational awareness needed for safe navigation.

The work is organized into three research thrusts. The first creates core sensing, prediction, control, and security capabilities for infrastructure-assisted micromobility, including predictive dynamic-map generation, world models for multi-agent interaction prediction, lightweight onboard control that fuses infrastructure predictions with local sensing, and cyber-physical security mechanisms. The second thrust designs intelligent next-generation wireless communication systems. Research is conducted at Rutgers University in collaboration with Saitama University, Shibaura Institute of Technology, and Keio University in Japan.

Performance occurs in New Brunswick, New Jersey, with a period of performance through July 31, 2029.