25-04-2025
Florida Atlantic University receives Department of Defense grant, will acquire Nvidia technology
The school will use Nvidia technology that could eventually be used to help the Air Force modernize its national defense and space operations.
Story Highlights Florida Atlantic University receives $800,000 grant for AI research.
FAU will acquire Nvidia technology for autonomous AI systems development.
Research aims to modernize Air Force defense and space operations.
Florida Atlantic University is poised to obtain state-of-the-art technology from the chipmaker Nvidia after receiving an $800,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Defense Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
FAU's Center for Connected Autonomy and Artificial Intelligence will use the grant to develop autonomous AI systems. That technology could eventually be used to help the Air Force modernize its national defense and space operations, said Dimitris Pados, principal investigator and director of the CA-AI.
'AI has far-reaching implications for the air and space forces within the U.S. Department of the Air Force,' he said. "Ensuring these systems are rigorously tested will be critical for their integration into operations, where precision, trust and adaptability are paramount."
While generative AI models are trained on enormous amounts of text and image data, enabling them to generate language and communicate abstract concepts, they are limited when it comes to understanding the physical world. To build a physical AI system, researchers need to train autonomous machines in controlled environments. That can help robots perform complex physical tasks and facilitate interactions between machines and humans, FAU reports.
The university will use the DOD funding to acquire Nvidia graphics processing units, chips that can handle intensive tasks such as graphics processing, renderings and AI. It will also use Nvidia infrastructure to develop virtual environments that represent the real world and generate data to train AI for robotics and wireless networks.
FAU will also use cameras, LiDAR sensors and augmented reality/virtual reality headsets to collect and render video and images that will be used in photo generation software in the Nvidia Omniverse, a platform for building 3D applications.
The platform will "enable new U.S. Department of Defense-related research opportunities such as test and evaluation of AI training datasets, learning with faulty and missing data, development of a digital spectrum twin for NextG communications and networking, simulation of schools of biorobotic fish or swarms of drones, among others,' said George Sklivanitis, co-principal investigator and professor at the FAU College of Engineering and Computer Science.
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