The Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory (ASDL) recently received a grant from the Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP) to support current and relevant Department of Defense (DoD) research in the areas of unmanned system autonomy and collaboration. The funding totals $350K and will be used to purchase equipment to augment current design and simulation facilities that allow for physical experimentation resulting in validation data to support digital engineering, data fusion, and other advanced methods.

The DURIP program is administered through a merit competition by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Army Research Office, and Office of Naval Research (ONR), and seeks specific proposals from university investigators conducting foundational science and engineering research relevant to national defense. This year the awards totaled $161 million and were given to 281 university researchers. The grants will support the purchase of major equipment to augment current and develop new research capabilities relevant to the DoD at 120 institutions across 39 states. This year’s awards will accelerate basic research in areas the National Defense Science and Technology Strategy prioritizes, including quantum computing and quantum networks, bioelectronics, hypersonics, autonomy, and the design, development, and characterization of novel materials.

ASDL will use the grant to enhance its ONR-sponsored Advanced Design Prototyping and Testing Laboratory (ADEPT). This lab fosters collaborative research and education/training across multidisciplinary teams of students, researchers, and practitioners in the emerging field of autonomous systems. Laboratory activities address all aspects of unmanned systems and autonomy from conceptual design to detailed design, prototyping, testing and evaluation of novel sea, air, and underwater autonomous vehicles.

Specifically, the grant will be used to augment current capabilities through additional sensors and communications equipment integrated into an Unmanned Collaborative Research Testbed (UCRT) to design, test and validate collaboration between heterogenous autonomous vehicles in real-world environments. ASDL currently has access to the computational and visualization assets required to enable design and testing of complex engineering systems, including Systems of Systems (SoS), as well as the experimental facilities to prototype and test small scale systems.

“We are grateful for the DURIP award because it will allow ASDL to expand its capabilities to enable the testing and validation of collaborative algorithms and techniques between unmanned autonomous vehicles (UAVs),” commented ASDL Director Prof. Dimitri Mavris. “The UCRT will furnish a suite of air, surface, and underwater vehicles as well as corresponding instrumentation and sensors to experimentally test and verify the collaborative methods being developed in simulation in real world environments relevant to defense research,” he continued.